| The Centre for Neuroscience and Cell Biology | |
|---|---|
| Type | Research Institute |
| Location | Coimbra, Portugal |
| President | Catarina Resende de Oliveira |
| Affiliations | University of Coimbra |
| Website | [1] |
The Centre for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC - Centro de Neurociências e Biologia Celular) is a bioscience and biomedicine research institute of the University of Coimbra, in Coimbra, Portugal. Its researchers come from three faculties of the University of Coimbra: the Faculties of Medicine, Pharmacy, and Science and Technology at the University of Coimbra. It is also linked to the University Hospitals of Coimbra (HUC) and several pharmaceutical companies. As a founding partner of the biotechnology association Biocant, the CNC has shown its commitment to foster technology transfer and the creation of novel biomedical and biotechnology enterprises.
The CNC was the first Associated Laboratory in Portugal, and is part of the Network of European Neuroscience Institutes (ENI). Since the mid-2000s, it has been involved in research collaborations between the Portuguese Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard Medical School (HMS).
AMILOIDE is the name of a BOINC-related research work of CNC and the Ibercivis distributed computing network, searching for drugs against neurodegenerative amyloid diseases. The AMILOIDE project refers to the computational search, amongst libraries of millions of compounds, for potential drugs to interfere with the formation of aggregates and amyloid fibers in neurodegenerative diseases. Currently, the main target diseases being studied are Familial Amyloid Polyneuropathy (FAP) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). This project is the responsibility of scientists of the Structural and Computational Biology Group at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC).