Hugo Gutiérrez de Terán Castañón

Hugo Gutiérrez de Terán Castañón is a Tenured Scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), assigned to the Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology Research Center (CINN), and Full Professor of Computational Biochemistry at Uppsala University. He graduated in Pharmacy from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC, 1999) and obtained his PhD in Experimental Sciences (Molecular Modelling and Computer-Aided Drug Design) from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona (UPF, 2004).

After a first postdoctoral period at Uppsala University, where he worked on computational methods to predict the affinities of biological molecules within a multidisciplinary antimalarial drug development project, in 2007 he set up his own research group through the Parga Pondal talent programme of the Xunta de Galicia, at the Galician Public Foundation of Genomic Medicine led by Dr. Ángel Carracedo. There he created the Structural Bioinformatics Unit and started his current line of research on the mechanism and regulation of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), the family of membrane receptors targeted by 30% of marketed drugs, developing his own methods such as the GPCR-ModSim server. When the first structures of these receptors became available, he spent a sabbatical at the Scripps Research Institute (California) with Prof. Raymond C. Stevens, where he carried out pioneering studies on the allosteric modulation of GPCRs.

In 2012 he returned to Uppsala, joining the computational biology programme led by Prof. Johan Åqvist, where he became Associate Professor (Docent, 2015), Senior Lecturer (2021) and Full Professor of Computational Biochemistry (2024). Over those 12 years his lab trained 7 PhD students, 4 postdocs and around 20 master students, and combined GPCR pharmacology with computational methods for structure-based drug screening and optimisation based on first-principles simulations. Highlights include his efficient free energy perturbation (FEP) protocols to estimate drug-protein affinities and the effects of mutations (Q-FEP), an open-source academic project whose commercial exploitation is handled by Modsim Pharma, the spin-off he co-founded. He obtained a Tenured Scientist position at CSIC in 2021 and, in November 2024, returned to his native Asturias to establish the Computational Biochemistry and Structural Bioinformatics laboratory at ISPA.

He has published more than 100 scientific articles (h-index above 35), led several funded projects and supervised nearly ten doctoral theses, while continuing to teach at Uppsala University and engaging in science outreach and knowledge and technology transfer. The current and future priorities of his lab are the search for new small molecules for cancer immunotherapy through polypharmacology strategies, the discovery of new membrane receptor modulators through allosteric mechanisms, and the mechanisms of pathogenic and treatment-resistance mutations, with implications for personalised medicine.