------ This ORCID profile is not completely up to date. My weekly updated CV can be found at: http://bio-hpc.eu/members/horacio-perez-sanchez/ -------
Nowadays drug discovery approaches are widely applied to the discovery of new drugs for treating relevant diseases but this is a very inefficient, slow and expensive process since many of the discovered compounds are very hard to design, obtain or synthesize and they incur side effects. I propose to solve this problem by replacing synthetic drugs by bioactive compounds from food, so that we would have higher chances to have an oral and safe drug, since most foods are taken orally and have been proven safe. This can be achieved with the use of advanced bioinformatic methodologies running on supercomputers (ABM), some of them developed by me. Apart for treating diseases, there is usually a lack of information at the atomic and molecular levels about how food compounds interact with other relevant molecules in many different Food Science and Technology (FST) contexts. For such problem I propose the exploitation of ABM in FST contexts, and to provide FST researchers with free access to them through software tools I have developed. It should be highlighted that the application of ABM in FST contexts is a novel approach that has not been conveniently explored or exploited yet.
Thanks to ABM I have developed and applied, it has been possible to identify and characterize more than 25 bioactive compounds in several FST and biomedical contexts. In addition, I have been able to analyze and propose useful models for molecular systems of interest in FST such as carbohydrates, proteins and DNA. Main results have been published in 82 ISI indexed scientific articles (8 as first author, 28 as corresponding author, 15 on the first decile and cumulative impact factor = 258), 4 international patents (2 of them licensed), 63 contributions to international conferences and 21 invited talks. I have been awarded with a H2020 technology transfer award and participated in 40 regional, national and international research projects attracting 882.000 € and supercomputing resources (I have been Principal Investigator in 21 of them) and established 5 contracts with industry and academy. I have been continuously financed by many competitive programmes to conduct research in Institutions of recognized prestige. My career has been developed in 3 different countries (Spain, France, Germany) with 11 different fellowships (2 Marie Curie). Currently I am Principal Investigator of the Structural Bioinformatics and High Performance Computing research group (http://bio-hpc.eu, 13 full-time staff) at UCAM. I have obtained teaching accreditation by ANECA for “Profesor Titular” (2016) and two “sexenios” (2002-2007 and 2008-2013) by the CNEAI).