Our group aims to support integrative systems pharmacological research focusing in developing innovative pharmacological tools to be used both in a non-clinical and clinical development pipeline, while predicting and modelling preventive or therapeutic clinical effects in a translational approach, profoundly anchored in state-of-the-art principles and guidance of Regulatory Science.

Instead of considering the effect of a drug to be the result of one specific drug-protein interaction, our lab applies systems biology principles to the field of basic and clinical pharmacology, epidemiology and regulatory science, seeking to understand how chemical, biological and naturally occurring substances are affected by and affect the human body as a complex biological system. By focusing on these effects as the outcome of a network of interactions these substances may have, a better translatability to a future clinical application is sought.

Applying the reversed principle of “bedside to bench and back”, together with the experience gathered with new and repurposed active substances, our group has also special interest in ethnopharmacology, ethnopharmacy and traditional use of foods for health, as a valuable source of new drug substances that could be used as a preventive or therapeutic tool.

Additionally, aiming at clinical translation, the expertise of the group is also spread among basic and clinical pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, top knowledge of molecular markers of disease and proper clinical and real-world data designs to generate evidence given the expertise in epidemiology and pharmacoepidemiology.

All our research is properly anchored in state-of-the-art regulatory science, as several members of the research team are European opinion leaders in regulatory science.