Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute
Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) is a centre of excellence for biomedical and health research.
IMIM is part of the Parc de Salut Mar consortium, and it is made up of more than 700 professionals, with a mixed composition of IMIM researchers and clinical researchers from Hospital del Mar and other researchers from Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Universitat Autònoma Universitat Pompeuand BarcelonaBeta Brain Research Center Foundation.
Role in Project
Our main role is to support the Obelisk research activities in WP4 by applying advanced bioinformatics, molecular modelling, and systems biology approaches to help unravel mechanisms underlying childhood obesity. In particular, IMIM leads efforts in predicting the impact of genetic variants, developing computational tools to identify how these variants contribute to obesity risk and disease progression. By combining computational innovation with biomedical insight, IMIM plays a key role in bridging molecular-level discoveries with clinically relevant outcomes.
People
Dr Jana Selent
Jana is the head of the GPCR Drug Discovery group of the IMIM-UPF joint Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) and associate lecturer at the Pompeu Fabra University. Presently, she is also the chair of the European Research Network on Signal Transduction (ERNEST COST action) with members from 36 countries.
Her group focuses on the functionality of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) taking into account: receptor plasticity, activation mechanism, signalling bias, ligand binding, the effect of the cell membrane and other interaction partners. For this, she applies a wide range of computational structural biology tools and rational drug design approaches ranging from molecular modelling, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, enhanced conformational sampling, and artificial intelligence/machine learning. Within the Obelisk project, her group studies the impact of genetic variants on receptor structure & dynamics and the functional outcome.
