New companies at PRBB: Acellera and ZeClinics
The Barcelona Biomedical Research Park is home to seven research centers, four companies and roughly 1,400 scientists and professionals from 55 countries.
By Biocat
Two new companies in the life sciences arena have begun activity in the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), Acellera and ZeClinics, as published in the journal El·lipse.
Acellera is a technology company that focuses on developing new software to optimize molecular dynamics simulations on a large scale, mainly for drug development, and provides services to companies and research centers and institutes. This London-based company was created in 2006 by Dr. Gianni De Fabritiis, head of the Research Program on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), and now has offices in Barcelona as well, headed up by David Soriano.
ZeClinics is a Contract Research Organization (CRO) start-up that carries out safety and efficacy tests on new chemical compounds for potential drugs—mainly in the fields of oncology and neural disorders—, cosmetics and nutritional products using the zebrafish as an animal model. Although ZeClinics doesn't have a physical location at the PRBB, it collaborates with the park’s animal facilities, one of the most complex and robotized in Europe, with 4,500 square meters of space and capacity for 50,000 zebrafish.
The founding partners of ZeClinics, PhD students and postdocs from the UPF and CRG, are Davide D’Amico (CEO), Javier Terriente (CSO), Ignasi Sahún (CMO) and Simone Calzolari (CTO). They receive support from the UPF and professor Florian Engert, who specializes in molecular and cell biology at Harvard University.
The PRBB is currently home to seven independent research centers of excellence working in the life sciences and four companies —MedSir and qGenomics, in addition to those mentioned above— that occupy 100% of the available space.