Ventura, Salvador

Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain)

Salvador Ventura is Full Prof. at the Dep. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and leader of the Protein Folding and Conformational Diseases group at the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IBB), Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). He has been director of the IBB in 2017-20. Dr. Ventura has authored more than 240 peer-reviewed research and review papers, apart from several book chapters and 13 patents. He got his Ph. D. in Biology at the UAB in 1998 and worked as postdoctoral fellow (1999-2002) at EMBL-Heidelberg. He has been researcher at Harvard Medical School (USA) and Karolinska Institutet (Sweden) among other centres. He rejoined UAB as a Ramon y Cajal researcher in 2003. Dr. Ventura received the UAB 2008 Excellence Research Award, the Bruker Prize “Manuel Rico” 2020 from the Spanish Biophysical Society and 2009, 2015 and 2020 ICREA-Academia Awards in Life Sciences and Medicine.


Abstract:

Finding new drugs for conformational diseases

Topic:

Conformational diseases are pathologies with a great social, economic and personal impact on our society. Some are well-known because they affect a large number of people, like Parkinson’s disease, while others are rare disorders, such as familiar amyloidosis. All these diseases remain incurable. They exhibit very different symptoms and each of these disorders is associated with a different protein. However, the problem that these proteins experiment is always the same: at a given time they become insoluble and toxic and they impact the normal physiology of the tissue or organ in which they reside, independently if this is the heart or the brain. In this presentation I will explain the efforts of our research group to find new drugs that can slow down the progress of these devastating diseases.


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