Dr Savins Puertas Martin, a Postdoc from the Chemoinformatics research group, received the Young Researcher Award in Computer Science 2022, a prestigious award from the Scientific Informatics Society of Spain (SCIE, Sociedad Científica Informática de España) and the BBVA Foundation. He received the award for his excellent contributions in the field of high-performance computing, which led to the development of innovative techniques that facilitate the design of new drugs, as well as his high level of internationalisation.
His research has focused on virtual screening, a technique that allows the selection of compounds most similar to a reference molecule from a database that may contain millions of them, with the aim of accelerating drug discovery and development. "The objective is to identify, in this database, which molecules are the most similar to the one we have selected as a reference, analysing different characteristics such as shape, number of atoms, etc. Initially, we start with billions of molecules, but we have to find a few hundred that we are interested in to develop a drug. My work contributes to developing methods to do that filtering."
With this goal in mind, Savíns has developed several programmes, including OptiPharm and MultiPharm, freely available to the scientific community via a web server. "We have had formal requests from up to twelve countries for the use of this software, and certainly many others have used it anonymously," he says. In addition, Savíns is applying this software in his research projects to search for new drugs, and in the last year, he has even started using high-performance computing in the radiotherapy field. "The aim," he explains, "is to try to apply this treatment to eliminate tumours without affecting the rest of the organs.
Currently, after receiving funding from a competitive contract called Margarita Salas from European funds, he is staying at our University where he will work for two years with Professor Val Gillet, of whom he says: "I am really grateful that Val gave me the opportunity to work with her here. The Chemoinformatics group in Sheffield has been one of the best in the world, and to be able to learn from them and contribute to my work is a great experience and a great challenge.
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