EDDU

Dr. Carles Galdeano (Director of EDDU): Specializes in biophysical techniques, medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, and cell biology. He has led research and transfer projects and is the co-founder of Oniria Therapeutics

Is an Associate Professor in Physical Chemistry in the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Technology, and Physical Chemistry of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences at the University of Barcelona (UB). He is also a group leader in the Institute of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry of the University of Barcelona (IQTC-UB). After obtaining his PhD at the UB (2014), he spent a short internship (2015) at the University of Florida with Prof. Adrian Roitberg, before joining the group of Prof. Julien Michel (2015-2020) as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow and a Postdoctoral Research Associate. He returned to the UB in 2020 as a Lecturer and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2024.

He has 15 years of experience working in Computational Chemistry and Computer-Aided Drug Design, with a focus on the identification of hit compounds for challenging macromolecular targets of therapeutic interest. He is a PI in several research projects funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and has collaborated with different biotechnological companies. He is co-inventor of a patent.

Is a Full professor, 2021, at the Unit of Medicinal Chemistry in the Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences in the University of Barcelona.
She received her PhD from this University in 1993.
Then, she spent four months stay in the University College of London as Honorary Fellow and two years funded by a Marie Curie Research Training Contract in Kingston University (UK). In 2003, was awarded with a Ramon y Cajal contract and in 2007 was appointed as associate professor. In 2016 funded by a Salvador de Maradiaga grant she spent three months in the Institute of Cancer Research (UK).

She is the coordinator of the Drug and Target Discovery Program of the Institute of Biomedicine of the Universitat de Barcelona (IBUB). Her present research is aimed to face multidisciplinary projects within chemistry and biology.
She is coinventor of several patents and the PI of competitive projects aimed to transfer research to companies and society (CaixaImpulse, Proof-of-concept, Llavor, Producte, F2I, etc) and contracts with companies (Fundació Bosh i Gimpera).

Graduated in Pharmacy at the University of Barcelona (1989), where he received the PhD degree (Medicinal Chemistry) in 1994 under the supervision of Prof. Pelayo Camps. For 2 years (Jan 1996 to Dec 1997) he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut für Organische Chemie of the Georg-August Universität (Göttingen, Germany), under the supervision of Prof. Reinhard Brückner.

In 2001 he was appointed Associate Professor of Organic and Medicinal Chemistry at the Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Therapeutic Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences, University of Barcelona (UB) and since July 2022 he is Full Professor at the same department.
He was Vice-Dean of Research of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences (UB) from November 2009 until March 2018. He is currently Head of the Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry of his faculty and member of the Governing Board of the Institute of Biomedicine of the UB (IBUB) since its founding in 2007.

He is a member of the Spanish Society of Medicinal Chemistry (SEQT) and the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry (RSEQ), Organic Chemistry Division.

He has authored 118 papers, 11 patents, and 8 book chapters, and guest-edited 20 special issues in medicinal chemistry journals and 9 E-books.

Is a Full Professor in Organic and Medicinal Chemistry in the Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Therapeutic Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences o the University of Barcelona (UB). He is also a founder member of the Institute of Biomedicine of the Universitat de Barcelona (IBUB). After his PhD in the UB (1996), he spent two years (1998-2000) at the University College London working as a Marie Curie Research Fellow within the group of Prof. William B. Motherwell. He returned to the UB in 2000 as Assistant Professor, he was “Investigador Ramón y Cajal” for four years and was later promoted to Associate Professor in 2005 and to Full Professor in 2020.

He has over 25 years of experience working on organic and medicinal chemistry, with focus on the synthesis of new compounds with potential biological activity. In addition to his academic research he has been PI in several valorization programs (Caixaimpulse, CaixaResearch, Producte, EIT Health, etc.). He regularly acts as PI in several research contracts with Spanish and international chemical and pharmaceutical companies. He is co-inventor in several patents both in new chemical entities with biological activity and in new processes for the manufacturing of generic active pharmaceutical ingredients, several of them transferred to private companies.

Is a Tenure-Track Professor in Organic and Medicinal Chemistry at the Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences, University of Barcelona (UB). She earned her PhD in 2021 under the supervision of Prof. Santiago Vázquez and Prof. David Soto, with research stays at the University of Rovira i Virgili (Spain) and the Institut Curie (France). After completing her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UB and spent two years as an R&D project leader at Biopharma Synergies, focusing on the development and optimization of synthetic processes for active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).

She has over 8 years of experience in Medicinal Chemistry, with expertise in designing and synthesizing bioactive compounds, electrophysiology (Patch Clamp Whole Cells), and IC50 determination in cell cultures. Dr. Turcu has collaborated extensively with pharmaceutical companies, leading projects on impurity detection, identification, and synthesis for APIs and final products.

She is the co-inventor of two patent applications, one of which has been extended in various countries and licensed to a U.S. company.

I am a computational chemist with 14 years of experience as a computational chemist in the field of computational biology and computer aided drug design (CADD). I have been recently appointed as lecturer in Physical Chemistry at the University of Barcelona, where I lead structure-based drug design projects on proteins of biomedical interest. I have devoted my career to understand the molecular mechanisms underpinning the function and the pharmacological modulation of proteins of biomedical interest.

First during my PhD at the group of Prof F Javier Luque (Universitat de Barcelona ES, 2011-2015), where I was trained as a molecular modeler, I contributed to several multidisciplinary projects, including the development of small-molecules against drug-resistant strains of Influenza A. After my PhD, I joined the the group of Prof Ulrich Zachariae (University of Dundee UK, 2016-2017) where I led two projects on the molecular mechanisms causing antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacteria: active drug efflux and facilitated diffusion of antibiotic drugs through porin pores. Of note, I contributed to the work that characterized the first and only structure of the tripartite assembly of the MacABTolC pump.
In 2018, I moved to the group of Prof Julien Michel (University of Edinburgh UK, 2018) to develop new approaches in the field of structure-based drug design. There, I developed methods to study the effect of ligand binding on the intrinsically disordered domain of MDM2, a major oncological target.
In 2019, I joined the EPCC, the top supercomputing centre in the UK, where I was assigned to several data science projects and software development projects (BioExcel2). In 2020, I moved back to Spain as a Juan de la Cierva Incorporación fellow (JdlC), where I investigated the determinants of metabolic genetic diseases affecting cholesterol transport.
In 2024, I joined the group of Dr C Galdeano (Universitat de Barcelona ES) as a senior researcher developing CADD pipelines.
In January 2025, I started my independent position as a lecturer Serra Húnter (Universitat de Barcelona ES), where I will lead a research line that aims to study and target the mechanisms of resistance of drug resistant bacteria.