Research projects led by UB researchers Francesc Palau Martínez, Marçal Pastor-Anglada and Antonio Zorzano Olarte will receive financial support from the Ramón Areces Foundation, in the eighteenth call for grants to research on life and earth sciences. This initiative, which aims to contribute to consolidate the scientific and technology structure in Spain, will support with 652.00 euros a total of six research projects in Barcelona, which have been selected out of the 631 that were presented in the biennial call. The grant ceremony of the Ramón Areces Foundation will take place in Madrid on Tuesday, March 2.

Link between rare and common diseases

Research on rare diseases is contributing to better understand some common diseases that share a similar phenotype. Francesc Palau, visiting professor from the Department of Surgery and Surgical Specializations of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the University of Barcelona and director of the Paediatric Institute of Rare Diseases – Hospital Sant Joan de Déu de Barcelona, will treat the existing links between rare and common diseases in his work. Professor Palau, an expert on neurogenetics on rare diseases and director of the Research Institute Sant Joan de Déu, will lead a project focused on the specific study of a set of genetic disorders of interest –rare diseases, Menkes, Wilson and Parkinson, which affect copper levels- and its relation with the mitochondrion, the cell organ that brings energy to the cell system.

Control of tumor progression

Cancer cells adapt their metabolism to guarantee their proliferation and survival. In this process, nucleotides are necessary, since they are the basic molecules to synthetize nucleic acids. Identifying new therapeutic targets to fight the mechanism of tumor progression is the objective of the project led by Marçal Pastor-Anglada, professor from the Department of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (Faculty of Biology), and director of the Consolidated Research Group on Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapies (MPET) of the UB. The team of Professor Pastor-Anglada, director of the Institute of Biomedicine of the University of Barcelona (IBUB) and member of the Biomedical Research Center of Hepactic and Digestive Diseases (CIBERehd), will focus on the study of control mechanisms of metabolic pathways related to these essential molecules for cell physiology.

Exosomes and cell stress

Antonio Zorzano, professor from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biomedicine of the UB (Biology), will drive the research on the molecular mechanisms that are involved in the production and release of exosomes –micro-vesicles secreted by cells- during cell stress. The project led by Antonio Zorzano, head of the Laboratory of Complex metabolic diseases and mitochondria of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and the Project on the development of system biology in personalized therapies for diabetes from CIBER in Diabetes and Associated Metabolic Disorders (CIBERDEM), will focus on the study of this biochemical mechanism under metabolic stress conditions and hypoxia of adipocytes. This research line will bring new data on the exosome generation in some pathologies (obesity, etc.) and the identification of biomarkers derived from exosomes of interest for future therapeutic approaches on pathologies related to obesity.

In Catalonia, the Ramón Areces Foundation will also fund the projects led by the experts Noemí De Luna Salvà (Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau); José Antonio Garrido (ICN2-Campus UAB) and María del Carmen Sánchez (Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute), aimed at the study of muscular diseases, application of graphene devices for the peripheral nervous system and the congenital dyserythropoietic anemia (CDA), respectively.

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