Our group is located at the Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences of the University of Barcelona (UB), Barcelona’s main university and Spain’s leading research university.

We combine expertise in organic and medicinal chemistry and in pharmacology. Thus, we are able to develop new synthetic methodology, design and synthesize novel bioactive compounds and perform in vitro and in vivo experiments for testing them in relevant models of diseases.

Regarding the synthetic work, it is performed at the Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry which has just finished a 1.5 million € full refurbishment, and has all the equipment required for conducting state-of-the-art organic and medicinal chemistry research:

1. basic equipment (rotavapors, heaters, vacuum oven, etc.) and medium-sized apparatus (automated column chromatography systems, microwave oven for organic reactions, parallel synthesizer, etc.),
2. specialized equipment, such as an H-Cube Pro system for performing flow-chemistry, a LambdaSphere^® photoreactor for performing flow-photochemistry, and a Peschl photoreactor for conducting large-scale photosynthesis,
3. analytical equipment (e.g., several HPLC, a FT/IR spectrometer, gas-liquid chromatograph, etc.),
4. a new high field (400 MHz) solution NMR spectrometer, with automatic sample changer, multinuclear probes and variable temperature facilities, and
5. mass spectrometry facilities that include a spectrometer for GC-MS analysis and a HPLC/MS equipment,
6. on-line access to hundreds of specialized journals and databases such as SciFinder^®, Web of Science^®, Scopus^®, The Merck Index^®, Pubmed, Pubchem, Espacenet, etc.

Moreover, there is a laboratory for special and dangerous reactions fully equipped with gases (CO₂, NH₃, Cl₂, O₂, etc.), an ozone generator and, a high-pressure hydrogenation laboratory.

The pharmacological evaluation work is performed at the Unit of Pharmacology, Pharmacognosy and Therapeutics. The Faculty of Pharmacy include an Animal Experimentation Facility, where there is the animal welfare center, with behavioral and cognitive facilities. The laboratory of pharmacology has the essential equipment to perform cell cultures (CO₂ incubators, laminar flux cabin), protein and gene determination (Electrophoresis and immunoblot devices, Chemiluminiscence reader, PCR, etc), plate spectrophotometer, plate luminometer, plate fluorimeter, fluorescence microscopy etc.

In addition to the equipment available in the Faculty facilities, we have access to the Scientific and Technological Centers (http://www.ccit.ub.edu/EN/home.html), a group of UB centers that support research with large equipment’s, including 500 MHz and 800 MHz NMR spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction analysis, mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography, several flow cytometers, wide-field transmitted light and fluorescence microscopes, stereo fluorescence microscope, confocal microscopes, and electronic microscope, among others.