Short bio
Dr Patrick Aloy is an ICREA Research Professor and Principal Investigator of the Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology lab at the IRB. He has a BSc in Biochemistry, an MSc in Biotechnology and a PhD in Computational Biology from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and spent six years as postdoctoral researcher and staff scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany. The main goal of his lab is to combine molecular, cell and computational biology to unveil the basic wiring architecture and dynamics of physio-pathological pathways. In the last years he has been developing resources to process, harmonize and integrate bioactivity data on small molecules, providing compound bioactivity descriptors that push the similarity principle beyond chemical properties.
Research interest
Currently, the main research line in the lab is to collect heterogeneous biological and chemical datasets and develop novel methodologies to integrate different layers of regulation to unveil disease signatures. We believe that AI has the potential to transform drug discovery, as it is reshaping other areas of science and technology. In particular, by incorporating the biological complexity in the first steps of the drug discovery process we might, for instance, overcome some of huge translational problems that current pipelines suffer when transitioning from pre-clinical to clinical efficacies. Moreover, navigating the embedded (latent) space might allow the AI-based design of new first-in-class molecules with completely novel pharmacological properties. To enable this systemic vision of pharmacology, we need to blend biology and chemistry in a format that is amenable for modern AI.