Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
SMASH Associate partner
IIT aim, as stated in the Foundation Statute, is to promote excellence in basic and applied research and to promote the development of the national economy. IIT has obtained more than 16000 publications on international scientific journals since 2006 to August 2021 and produced more than 300 inventions, which have resulted in more than 1100 patent applications. The relevant expertise has already begun, over the years, to imbue the productive fabric. IIT’s CONCEPT laboratory (the Computational mOdelling of NanosCalE and bioPhysical sysTems laboratory) focusses on the development of new algorithms to accelerate the simulation of processes of pharmaceutical and biological relevance.
Within the IIT’s CONCEPT Lab scientists of different background, from chemistry to engineering, work side-by-side with the main goal to foster the transformation of ideas and models into highly efficient computational implementations.
Main research directions are:
-) developing new algorithms to accelerate the simulation of processes of pharmaceutical and biological relevance, such as the interaction between proteins and drug candidates;
-) engineering proteins, such as antibody fragments, aiming to improve their affinity to given targets;
improving the description of systems from the nanoscale to the mesoscale by means of continuum --) electrostatics and advanced implicit solvent methods, with particular attention devoted to the description and calculation of molecular surfaces.
Supervisors
- Sara Fortuna – Researcher, IIT 5.1 Early detection and monitoring of diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and glioblastoma
- Walter Rocchia – Senior Researcher, IIT 5.1 Early detection and monitoring of diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and glioblastoma 5.2 Research in explainable AI in personalised medicine