17/11/2015

A day dedicated to the most innovative in silico strategies in biomedical research

The concept in silico refers to those computer simulations that model natural or laboratory processes and that are used for investigating any natural science. This expression is used in line with the terms in vivo and in vitro that define the experiments performed on living organisms or outside them, respectively. The in silico expression arises from the material from which are made all the computer components: silicon.

The in silico strategies are gaining weight in research because of their extreme speed and profitability as they can be applied even if the component of study is not physically available. For this reason, the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (DCEXS) focuses its fourth symposium on the new in silico strategies in biomedical research.

The event, that will take place next Tuesday, 17 November, is organized by the Department together with the Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), a joint programme of the DCEXS and the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), and with the support of the Platform of Biomolecular and Bioinformatics Resources (PRB2), Novartis and Bioinformatics Barcelona.

The DCEXS director, Arcadi Navarro, will welcome the journey together with Jorge Cuneo, the medical director of Novartis and patron of the 25 ^th anniversary of the UPF, and Ferran Sanz, director of GRIB. Among the invited speakers are Marta Filizola, principal investigator at the Department of Structural and Chemical Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (New York); Joaquin Dopazo, director of the Department of Computational Genomics of the Príncipe Felipe Research Centre (Valencia), and Alfonso Valencia, leader of the Computational and Structural Biology group of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and director of the Spanish National Institute for Bioinformatics. The program is completed with a number of leading researchers in biomedicine that will explore advances in the in silico strategies.

The aim of the annual DCEXS symposium is to show the department's research programmes and promote the education of the young researchers, as well as provide a place where the researchers can discuss their latest results. This is the fourth year that DCEXS celebrates the symposium. The fields treated on the previous editions have been neurosciences and genetics, evolutionary biology and cellular signalling.