Institute for Research in Biomedicine, Barcelona, Spain

Dr Patrick Aloy is an ICREA Research Professor and Principal Investigator of the Structural Systems Biology lab at the IRB. He obtained his BSc in Biochemistry and a MSc in Biotechnology by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, and spent six years as postdoctoral researcher and staff scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany. For fifteen 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 95 publications in first-rate journals, with over 7900 citations and remarkable press coverage, illustrating the scientific and social relevance of the work.

The main goal of his laboratory is to combine computational and structural biology with interaction discovery experiments to unveil the basic wiring architecture of physio-pathological pathways. It is his 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, optimisation of preclinical models and understanding how biological networks change from the healthy state to disease.