Research interests

My main research line is on Structural models of membrane receptors and interactions with their ligands: applications to drug design. I am mostly focused on G-protein coupled receptors, which are the targets of >30% of the marketed drugs. The growing structural information on GPCRs, in combination with spectroscopy, resonance and biochemical studies are key to study receptor dynamics or to characterize receptor-ligand interactions by computational methods, an area where my research group is particularly well positioned. Our activities in this area is organized around the following topics:

• The development of a unique pipeline connecting protein structure modeling with accurate prediction of ligand-binding affinities and applications to the modulation of selected biopharmaceutical targets. This is centralized at the GPCR-ModSim web server.
• To elucidate the mechanisms of subtype selectivity and conformational specificity of agonist and antagonist binding, and to assess on the ligand design on different families of G-protein coupled receptors.
• Enzyme inhibitor design

Group members

Hugo Gutiérrez de Terán, Associate professor
Willem Jespers, PhD student
Silvana Vasile, PhD student
Amber van Veen, MSc student
Jessica Sallander, Postdoc

Contact

Hugo.gutierrez@icm.uu.se