Ferran Nadal-Bufi
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Contact details
- Email: fnadalb@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Institute for Regeneration and Repair (South Building)
Edinburgh BioQuarter, 4-5 Little France Drive - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH16 4UU
Background
Dr. Ferran Nadal-Bufi completed his undergraduate and master's studies in Barcelona, Spain. In 2017, he moved to Brisbane, Australia, to pursue a PhD at the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland under the supervision of Sonia Henriques and David Craik. After a brief postdoctoral position at UCLouvain in Brussels, Belgium, he moved to Edinburgh, UK, in 2023 to join Marc Vendrell’s lab at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on advanced therapeutics, including peptides, proteins, and antibodies, with a particular emphasis on cellular delivery. He is currently developing fluorescent tools to guide the rational design of Antibody-Drug Conjugates (ADCs).
Research summary
I am a chemical biologist studying how advanced therapeutics work at the molecular level, with a particular focus on antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). My research integrates chemical design, molecular biology, and imaging to understand how drugs enter, traffic, and act inside cells. I have led projects developing activatable fluorophores to track the cellular uptake of peptides (Nadal-Bufi et al., Pep Sci, 2020; Nadal-Bufi et al., J Med Chem, 2021; Nadal-Bufi et al., Cell Mol Life Sci, 2022; Nadal-Bufi et al., ACS Cent Sci, 2024) and proteins (Harel et al., JACS, 2025; Nadal-Bufi et al., Prot Sci, 2025), as well as to study ADC payload release in real-time (Nadal-Bufi et al., JACS, 2025). Supported by IRR Innovator and ECR Seed Funding, and in collaboration with industrial partner AbbVie, I am developing high-content imaging platforms for drug discovery and optimisation. Trained across Spain, Australia, Belgium, and the UK, I bring multidisciplinary expertise in peptide and protein chemistry, drug delivery, cancer biology, and biomedical imaging, combining these fields to drive innovation in advanced therapeutics.
Invited speaker
(2025) PEGS Europe: Protein & Antibody Engineering Summit (Lisbon, Portugal). Shedding Light on ADCs: A Fluorogenic Platform for Real-Time Imaging of Payload Release.