The Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) is a joint research programme of the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) and the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. GRIB brings together a multidisciplinary team of more than seventy scientists, as well as technical and management staff. M. Mar Albà (IMIM) and Ferran Sanz (UPF) are both Directors of GRIB.

The GRIB mission is to develop and apply computational methods and information technologies for a better understanding and prediction of biological phenomena, giving especial emphasis to those related to the human diseases, their prevention, diagnosis and pharmacological treatment.

The Programme has strong links with the Bioinformatics Unit of the IMIM's MarGenomics core facility, coordinated by Dr. Júlia Perera. The aim of MARGenomics is to support researchers along all the process of genomic analysis with a focus on translational research (project design, sample processing, data analysis and interpretation of results). The Bioinformatics Unit offers bioinformatics, statistical and methodological support with a special focus on high throughput omics data analysis.

GRIB has a long record of leadership and participation in EU-funded projects and collaboration with pharmaceutical industry in knowledge management, translational bioinformatics, genomics and predictive modelling. GRIB has a long tradition of collaboration with the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry in the framework of R&D projects and also providing services, especially in the development of computational methods for drug discovery. GRIB staff is involved in pre and postgraduate teaching at the UPF and we are coordinators of the Master in Bioinformatics for Health Sciences.

We are located at Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB) where an exceptional cluster of research programmes and groups are working on Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics. The collaborations within scientists of these groups are frequent and productive, in particular with the Computational Biology of RNA Processing group of CRG and with Hospital del Mar research groups.

The research activity of GRIB has originated the development of numerous scientific software and the creation of some spin-off companies: MedBioinformatics Solutions, Acellera and Chemotargets.