The Spanish National Research Centre (CNIO) is a Spanish public institution focused on the research, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The CNIO is positioned within the top 10 ranking of research centres dedicated to cancer research worldwide (Scimago; Nature Index) and covers the whole R+D+I process, from basic up to clinical research to translate their results into the National System of Health and to the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry and markets.

The CNIO accounts with the Experimental Therapeutics Programme (ETP), which is dedicated to carry out the early phases of the drug discovery process focused on therapeutics targets emerging from the basic research groups of the centre. ETP has been able to discover and develop several innovative kinase inhibitors which have been licensed by pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies for their clinical development.

The Experimental Therapeutics Programme from the CNIO and Pharmacelera have reached an agreement to use the computational technology developed by the latter to find and design new drugs for cancer treatments. PharmScreen, Pharmacelera’s flagship software, will be used to screen compound libraries and identify the most promising hits as starting points for further optimization. This agreement has been signed after CNIO has tested the technology with internal datasets and the software’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been enhanced for medicinal chemists.