2018Health1

On-line application form

Supervisor mail:

Title of the research project:

Novel personalized drugs for infectious and conformational diseases

Description of the research project:

 Personalized Medicine is an urgent need for people. Each of us carries a slightly different genetic information at birth, hosts a diverse community of microbes (both beneficial and pathogenic) and accumulates fortuitous mutations. Because of this singularity in every person, existing drugs not always provide effective cure for every patient. On the other hand, advances in DNA sequencing and in many other analytical tools allow obtaining for any patient, a wealth of information with medical relevance, in a fast and cheap manner.

For Personalized Medicine to revolutionize Medicine combined advance are required in order to:

1. Achieve accurate diagnostic
2. Develop new drugs to be able to treat effectively each patient once he/she has been diagnosed with precision.

Our research group is expert in proteins, the molecular actors of cells. We study proteins in the laboratory and also in the computer. To contribute to the personalization of Medicine our group has two major goals:

1. To understand the phenotypic effect of mutations at the protein level in order to develop accurate bioinformatics tools to assist medical doctors in delivering accurate genetic diagnostic (genetic diagnostic is still in its infancy!).
2. To develop new drugs to provide cure for people in need of personalized treatments, specifically to people infected by bacteria highly resistant to common antibiotics, and to people suffering from rare inherited metabolic diseases without treatment.

In this project, we will focus in the goal of developing new drugs. A combined project including bioinformatics work on the same diseases can be offered for students so inclined.

We are developing drugs that kill Helicobacter pylori, the bacteria that causes peptic ulcer and gastric cancer and is currently infecting 50 % of the human population. Some of these compounds are effective against clarithromycin and metronidazole resistant strains. In this project, the student will work in the improvements of the compounds so that their bioavailability is increased and therapeutic concentrations can be reached in blood after oral administration. The work may require getting trained and working in chemical synthesis, microbiology, and work with animal models.

At the same time, we are developing drugs to fight a rare disease, phenylketonuria (PKU) that affects 1 in every 10.000 new born. The disease is caused by mutations in the enzyme that transform the amino acid phenylalanine into tyrosine. Our drugs bind to and stabilize the defective enzyme so that the enzymatic activity is restored. In this project, the student will test 10 such stabilizing compounds, select the most potent ones and then select those effective against the mutations (approximately 2/3 of all mutations) that do not respond to the existing treatment for the disease. The work may require getting trained and work in chemical synthesis, computational design, cell culture, work with animal models, and also being in contact with PKU patients associations (e.g. ARAPKUOTM).

External training will be provided at Institute Pasteur (Paris) on murine models and at the ICVV of La Rioja University on protein docking.  In the last year, additional training in local biotechnology companies may be required

PHD Programme:

Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

University of Zaragoza

Supervisor short biography:

I took a PhD in Chemistry (U. of Zaragoza) and did a postdoc at the Protein Engineering Center at Cambridge University (UK). I am Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at U. of Zaragoza and Director of the Institute for Biocomputation and Complex Systems Physics (BIFI). The research in my group combines experimental and computational studies on proteins and small molecules and is currently focused in developing novel drugs as well as novel bioinformatics tools for Personalized Medicine. In this respect, we are running several projects of drug discovery (antimicrobials and pharmacological chaperones) and are developing computational tools to improve genetic interpretation.

I have directed 19 Doctoral Theses (10 male and 9 female; 13 Spanish-born and 6 from other countries). Most of the Ph D. from my group have continued very successful careers in Science or industry. My group enjoys a great network of collaborators all over the world

Gross annual salary:

22.000-26.000 €

The employment contract in each recruiting institution will apply internal rules so final retribution might slightly differ.

Working hours:

Dedication: