The mission of the joint Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) of IMIM and the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) is to develop and apply computational methods and information technologies for a better understanding and prediction of biological phenomena, placing special emphasis on those related to human diseases, their diagnosis and pharmacological treatment. GRIB has five research groups affiliated to IMIM: Evolutionary Genomics (M. Albà), GPCR Drug Discovery (J. Selent), Integrative Biomedical Informatics (L. Furlong and F. Sanz), PharmacoInformatics (M. Pastor) and Systems Pharmacology (J. Mestres).

Outstanding scientific achievements

During 2019, GRIB coordinated two EU-funded projects, eTRANSAFE and NEURON PSYBIAS, and participated as a partner in seven more projects: FAIRplus, TransQST, EU-ToxRisk, Escape-net, EOSC-Life, EU-OPENSCREEN DRIVE and EXCELERATE, as well as other national projects and contracts with the industry.

GRIB’s research activities led to the creation of the spin-off company MedBioinformatics Solutions, which develops products and services based on DisGeNET, an internationally recognised knowledge resource on disease genetics (50,000+ users per year).

Mar Albà’s research on de novo genes was featured in Nature on Oct 16, 2019.

Some scientific publications

• IMEx Consortium Curators at al. (incl. Piñero J & Furlong LI). Capturing variation impact on molecular interactions in the IMEx Consortium mutations data set. Nat Commun 2019; 2; 10(1): 10.

• Ruiz-Orera J, Albà MM. Translation of Small Open Reading Frames: Roles in Regulation and Evolutionary Innovation. Trends Genet. 2019; 35(3): 186-98.

• Bofill A, Jalencas X, Oprea TI, Mestres J. The human endogenous metabolome as a pharmacology baseline for drug discovery. Drug Discov Today 2019; 24(9): 1806-20. (Drug Discovery Today included an Editorial on this paper and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery commented it).

• Leis A, Ronzano F, Mayer MA, Furlong LI, Sanz F. Detecting Signs of Depression in Tweets in Spanish: Behavioral and Linguistic Analysis. J Med Internet Res 2019; 21(6): e14199.