Álvaro Serrano

Postdoctoral researcher
University of Barcelona

Álvaro Serrano-Morrás obtained his Bachelor's in Biology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, followed by a MSc in Bioinformatcs at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. During his master's thesis he joined the Barril's Lab, where he performed studies the activity cliff predictions through non equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. He started the PhD in the same group, where he has implemented and used molecular dynamics pipelines in the context of drug design, in tight collaboration with experimentalist colleagues. In particular, he has evaluated the druggability of large protein complexes related to the ubiquitin proteasome system (UPS) using mixed solvent molecular dynamics. The study also led to the discovery of new UPS modulators, whose mechanism of action I evaluated through Markov state modeling. Moreover he has continued the development and application of non-equilibrium simulations to quickly evaluate protein-ligand complexes in late stages of ultra-large virtual screening campaigns. He defended his PhD thesis in Oct 2024.