Professor Marçal Pastor Anglada, new Director of IBUB

Professor Marçal Pastor Anglada from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biomedicine, has been appointed new Director of the Institute of Biomedicine of the University of Barcelona (IBUB), taking the place of Francesc Villarroya, who is also professor in the same Department and has been in charge of the position in the Institute for the last eight years.

IBUB is a biomedicine research institute in the University of Barcelona. It was created in September 2006 in order to promote the collaboration of research teams from a multidisciplinary and integrative perspective within the biomedicine field. In the new IBUB framework, the secretary position will be taken by the teacher Santiago Vàzquez (Faculty of Pharmacy), and the permanent committee will be filled by teachers Bru Cormand, Florenci Serras and Francesc Villarroya (Faculty of Biology), Laura Herrero and Diego Muñoz-Torrero (Faculty of Pharmacy) and Anna Grandas (Faculty of Chemistry).

The new IBUB Director, Marçal Pastor Anglada, is a member of the Biomedicine Research Center in Hepatic and Digestive Diseases (CIBERehd), the European Science Foundation (ESF) and the European Medical Research Concil (EMRC), among others. He is also the founder of the Spanish Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SEBBM), and leads the Research Group on Molecular Pharmacology and Experimental Therapies (MPET) in the UB. It has a range of diverse research lines on cellular and molecular biology in the membrane transporters (especially in epithelial cells and the immune system), the ionic transporter and the glutamate and glutamine transporters on renal epithelium. There is a big importance in the works on the CNT and ENT carrier genic families, responsible for collecting the natural nucleosides and a wide range of cytotoxic medicines- akin to nucleosides- which are used in treatments for cardiovascular illnesses and antitumor and antiviral therapies.