Horacio Pérez-Sánchez, PhD
Director · Structural Bioinformatics & HPC Research Group (BIO-HPC) · UCAM Universidad Católica de Murcia
Twenty-five years building computational methods that move compounds from supercomputers to the clinic — at the HiTech Innovation Hub, Murcia, Spain.
About
Horacio leads the BIO-HPC group at UCAM, where his team develops structural bioinformatics, AI and machine-learning methods for drug discovery, and deploys them on High Performance Computing infrastructure. The group’s pipeline currently includes 12 drug-discovery programs across oncology, metabolism, inflammation and drug-resistance indications — with 8 patents filed or licensed and 2 clinical studies started in Murcia (2022, 2023).
He has built international collaborations with pharma, biotech, agri-food and academic groups, supervised 15 PhD theses, raised more than 6M€ in competitive funding (including European Horizon projects, Marie Curie fellowships, Spanish national programmes and Fundación Séneca), and authored 200+ peer-reviewed publications and patents. The group has released 12 software tools as open source or freely accessible web servers, several of them in use by external academic and industrial groups worldwide.
Beyond research, Horacio hosts the podcast Investigando la Investigación (since 2021, 400+ episodes in Spanish) and mentors early-career researchers on the non-technical side of an academic career — at horacio-ps.com.
Selected achievements
Drug discovery to clinic
Two clinical studies started in Murcia from compounds discovered in-house: imipramine repurposing for colorectal cancer (2022) and a silibinin natural product for weight-loss (2023). See the full pipeline →
Open tools at scale
Author and lead developer of MetaScreener, ASGARD, SIBILA, TOLEDO, STELLAR and the OptiPharm family — used to run virtual screening campaigns against millions of compounds on HPC infrastructure. See the toolbox →
Funding & collaborations
Coordinator and PI in European Horizon, Marie Curie and Spanish national projects. Long-standing collaborations with pharma, biotech and agri-food industry partners across Spain and Europe. Two H2020 HiPEAC technology transfer awards.
Talk to the group leader
All commercial enquiries, partnership proposals and academic collaborations come directly to me.
Research contracts
Drug discovery, HPC capacity and AI-on-HPC services, contracted through UCAM’s Technology Transfer Office.
Co-development & licensing
Joint development and out-licensing of the group’s patented compounds and software tools.
Academic collaborations
Joint projects, co-supervision and proposal writing for European and national funding calls.
Prof. Horacio Pérez-Sánchez · hperez@ucam.edu
ORCID 0000-0003-4468-7898