Dr Patrick Aloy is an ICREA Research Professor and Principal Investigator of the Structural Systems Biology lab at the IRB. He has a BSc in Biochemistry and a MSc in Biotechnology from the Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and spent six years as postdoctoral researcher and staff scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany. For twenty years, Dr Aloy has been developing and implementing new technologies and algorithms, applying state-of-the-art methods to specific problems and bridging the gap between theoretical models and experiments in different disciplines. In the last years, he has pioneered system-scale analyses of macromolecular assemblies and networks using high-resolution three-dimensional structures, which has become a new discipline in structure prediction. Dr Aloy has over 120 publications in first-rate journals, with over 11,950 citations and remarkable press coverage, illustrating the scientific and social impact of the work.

Research interests

The main goal of my laboratory is to combine computational and structural biology with interaction discovery experiments to unveil the basic wiring architecture of physio-pathological pathways. It is our believe that a deeper knowledge of the global topology of interactome networks related to human disease will have important bearings in the discovery of new drug targets and biomarkers, optimization of preclinical models and understanding how biological networks change from the healthy state to disease. Additionally, in the last years, we have incorporated a complementary research line on systems pharmacology, so that the group can now tackle complex diseases from the drugs´ perspective, providing compound bioactivity descriptors that push the similarity principle beyond chemical properties, reaching various ambits of biology.