IRB Barcelona to coordinate two European biomedicine projects
The Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) has been awarded funding of Euro 5m over the next three years to coordinate two European health research projects, as part of the second call of the European Commission"s VII Framework Programme.
The Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) has been awarded funding of €5m over the next three years to coordinate two European health research projects, as part of the second call of the European Commission’s VII Framework Programme.
Malaria and diabetes will be the topics addressed by the consortia headed by researchers LluÃs Ribas de Pouplana and Antonio Zorzano.
The consortium coordinated by Ribas de Pouplana, ICREA researcher and head of the gene translation laboratory at IRB Barcelona, will explore a promising line of investigation to find new anti-malarial compounds.
The project, called Mephitis, seeks to elucidate the formation of proteins in the parasite that are involved in the transmission of malaria, with the aim of identifying the key components that inhibit this process and allow the development of anti-malarial drugs.
Ribas de Pouplana has brought together experts from several fields: plasmodium biology, protein synthesis processes, and advanced tools used in crystallography, bioinformatics, genome dynamics, transcriptomics and proteomics.
The researcher Miriam Royo manages the combinatorial chemistry programme of the Barcelona Science Park, the centre that hosts IRB Barcelona, and one of the eight laboratories included in the consortium. In addition to the two groups in Barcelona, there are two from India, and one from France, Italy, Portugal and Australia.
Zorzano, head of the molecular medicine programme at IRB Barcelona and senior professor at the University of Barcelona, will coordinate a project to fight against diabetes. The MITIN project will for the first time apply bioinformatics to obtain information about complex diseases such as diabetes.
To develop the project, Zorzano is supported by two groups of systems biology experts. One is from the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, a facility that hosts the MareNostrum supercomputer. This group will design a computational programme that includes experimental data. The second group, from Finland, has expertise in lipidomics, which allows the determination of fat composition in body tissues and fluids.
The four remaining laboratories, two in England, one in Germany and Zorzano’s own lab, will apply their experience to the study of insulin resistance and diabetes in the mouse and the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster), and to the manipulation of individual mammalian cells.