During the first week of June, the first summer school of the European project PROTECTED was held in the British city of Belfast, and all students of the project attended.
PROTECTED is focused on protection against endocrine disruptors (DEs).The participation of ProtoQSAR in this event is two fold: on the one hand, our collaborator Elizabeth Goya -who is also following the Chemistry PhD program at the University of Valencia– participates as a student at this summer school. Elizabeth also stays for three months to learn different techniques of DEs bioassays in the laboratory “Food Quality, Safety and Nutrition” (Institute for Global Food Security, Queen’s University Belfast, IGFS – QUB), directed by the prestigious professor Dr. Lisa Connolly.
On the other hand, the director of ProtoQSAR, Rafael Gozalbes, gave a talk entitled “Molecular modeling and chemoinformatic approaches for prediction of biological and toxicological parameters”. In this seminar Rafael explained to the students of the project the different areas in which the computational methods can be applied, their advantages and limitations, and the regulatory aspects in which the QSAR models can be very useful today for compliance with international norms such as REACH or BPR.
This event was organized by Professor Lisa Connolly and her collaborator and project manager of PROTECTED, Katie Austin. In addition to ProtoQSAR, other entities of the project also participated, such as the Dutch company BioDetection Systems B.V., represented by its Director of Innovation, Dr. Bart van der Burg, and Professor Dr. Steven Verhaegen of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU).
