Scientific advisory board

Chiara Bonini, M.D.

Chiara Bonini, M.D., Professor of Hematology at the University Vita-Salute, San Raffaele
(https://research.hsr.it/en/divisions/division-of-immunology-transplantation-and-infectiousdiseases/
experimental-hematology/chiara-bonini.html). She was trained in Milano (Ospedale San Raffaele – OSR, C. Bordignon), New York (MSKCC, R. O’Reilly) and Seattle (FHCRC, P.D. Greenberg). Since 2008 she is the Head of the Experimental Hematology Unit of OSR; since 2013. She is Deputy Director of the Division of Immunology, Transplantation and Infectious Diseases of OSR, that holds approximately 250 researchers, 70 of which are actively involved in the field of cancer immunology and cancer immunotherapy. She has been a member of the Boards of ESGCT and ASGCT (European and American Societies of cell and gene therapy 2006-2013) and EBMT (2014-2018). She is currently member of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) Awards Committee, the ASH Global Research Award Subcommittee, of the Board of the European School of Hematology (ESH) and of the European Hematology Association (EHA). She is author of 144 publications in international scientific journals (Avarage IF>14); ORCID N. 0000-0002-0772-1674.

SCOPUS AUTHOR ID- 57211285047; Web of Science- REASERCHER ID: I-9202-2012; Scopus “h” index: 52. Inventor of 8 international patents on cell and gene therapy, of which 6 has already been granted and licensed. Her main research focus is the development, preclinical and clinical validation of cell and gene therapy approaches to treat cancer.

Dr. Ángel Carracedo Álvarez

Dr. Carracedo holds a degree in Medicine from the University of Santiago de Compostela (1978) and a Doctorate in Medicine from the same USC (1982), both with an extraordinary award.

Professor of Forensic Medicine since 1989 and Director of the USC Institute of Forensic Medicine (from 1994 to 2012). Director of the Galician Public Foundation for Genomic Medicine (SERGAS-Xunta de Galicia) (since 1999), Director of the National Center for Genotyping-ISCIII (since 2002). Group leader of the CIBER of rare diseases (CIBERER) and of the Institute of Sanitary Investigation of Santiago de Compostela (IDIS). The Genomic Medicine group he coordinates consists of 10 research groups, several technology platforms and about 100 people working there.
He has published 12 books and more than 600 articles in international journals (SCI), including articles in Nature, Science, NatureGenetics, as well as major journals in medical genetics, cancer, and forensic medicine. According to Thomson Reuters (Web of Knowledge) the Genomic Medicine Group he leads is the first in the world in citations in the field of Forensic Medicine in the 2001-2011 decade, and he is the author with more articles, more citations and more H-index in the area. Her current lines of research include the genetics of childhood cancer and psychiatric illness, and pharmacogenomics.
President of the International Society for Forensic Genetics. Co-director of the Molecular Medicine Unit Inco Sergas, he is the author of several books and hundreds of publications. Vice President of the International Academy of Forensic Medicine, member of the European DNA Group and the DNA Commission of the United States Justice Commission, coordinator of the European DNA Standardization Network and the Ibero-American Molecular Genetics Network for Forensic Medicine.
He currently coordinates research with teaching work. He is Professor of Forensic Medicine, Medical Ethics and Molecular Biology at the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry of the University of Santiago de Compostela. He was chosen as the sponsor of the 2000/2001 and 2011/2012 promotions of the Degree in Medicine due to his great proximity to students. In 2013, he joined the Galician Academy of Pharmacy as a full member.

Dr. Carlos Cordón

Dr. Carlos Cordon-Cardo earned his medical degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (1980), and his PhD in Cell Biology and Genetics from Cornell University (1985). Dr. Cordon-Cardo is Professor and Chair System-Wide of the Department of Pathology, Molecular and Cell-Based Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Health System. He was previously Professor and Vice-Chair of Pathology at Columbia University; and from 1987 to 2006 a faculty member in the Department of Pathology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where he created the Division of Molecular Pathology and served as its first Director; scaling the academic ranks from Assistant to Professor of Pathology at Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University. A pioneer of the oncologic molecular pathology discipline, Dr. Cordon-Cardo has helped establish a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of human cancers and new targets for cancer therapeutics, enhancing the vision of personalized medicine. He has more recently developed and implemented a novel “systems pathology” platform, using artificial intelligence tools including deep-learning and novel algorithms, generating highly accurate mathematical models of cancer with the goal of optimizing treatment and improving patient outcome. During the present COVID-19 pandemic he designed and implemented a laboratory testing platform that includes qualitative and quantitative assays for viral SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis, as well as qualitative and quantitative antibody testing for monitoring immunity (tests that were given emergency use authorization (EUA) from both the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) and the FDA.

Dr. Cordon-Cardo is Principal Investigator on several National Cancer Institute grants, and has received uninterrupted NIH/NCI funding for the past 30 years. Dr. Cordon-Cardo has lectured widely and is one of the “Highly Cited Authors” by the Institute of Scientific Information, one of the “Highly Influential Biomedical Researchers” (one of the top 400 over 15,153,100 author identifiers) by the European Society for Clinical Investigation; and one of the top “List of 500 Most Highly Cited Researchers Worldwide,” Google Scholar (107,162; h-index 162; i10-index 537 – as of 07/07/2021). Committed to educating the newest generation of scientists in his field, Dr. Cordon-Cardo has mentored over 70 investigators throughout his career. For this work and achievements Dr. Cordon-Cardo is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including «Roll of Honour» of the International Union Against Cancer; Gold Medal of the Swedish Society of Physicians; Honorary Member, Spanish American Medical and Dental Society; Distinguished Alumnus Award, Weill-Cornell Graduate School of Medical Science, Cornell University; Fellow, Royal Society of Medicine, UK; and Member, European Union Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Luciano Di Croce

Senior group leader and Program Coordinator at the Center for Genomic Regulation, and EMBO Member, obtained his PhD from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. In 1996 he moved to Marburg (Germany) as a postdoctoral fellow where he became interested in understanding the link between transcription and chromatin structure. He then moved to Milan in the lab directed by PG Pelicci for a second post-doctoral stage. Here, Di Croce unveiled the unexpected link between the oncogenic fusion protein PML-RARa and DNA methylation (Di Croce et al. Science, 2002). In 2003, he established his laboratory at CRG in 2003, as an ICREA Professor.
Since its formation, Di Croce group has focused its research efforts on understanding how epigenetic modifications and chromatin changes are established and, once in place, how they affect gene expression, cell differentiation and transformation. Leukemia is the primary cancer model system studied in their lab, and they use either mouse models that recapitulate human leukemia or primary samples from human leukemic patients to investigate the links between epigenetic alterations and the leukaemogenesis processes.
Moreover, Di Croce lab is interested in understanding how variations in the assembly of the Polycomb complexes occur and influence adult stem cell differentiation and animal development. To achieve this, he coordinated an EU FP7 4DCellFate consortium. Since 2018, Di Croce coordinates an EU Training Network (ChromDesign), which connects top EU laboratories working in the field of chromatin and human diseases aiming to characterize the impact of the three-dimensional (3D) chromatin organization on gene regulation during cellular differentiation.

Dra. Isabel Fariñas

Isabel Fariñas received her PhD in Biology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona with a thesis done at the Institute Cajal of the CSIC in Madrid. After a postdoctoral period (1993-1998) as a Fulbright and HFSPO fellow and later as a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco, she joined the University of Valencia where she is Professor in Cell Biology and director of the Molecular Neurobiology Unit. Her entire scientific background falls within the field of neurobiology and her best contributions have come in two areas. Her postdoctoral studies contributed to establish the essential functions of the neurotrophic factors of the families of neurotrophins and GDNF. Her studies in genetically modified mice contributed to the mapping of trophic dependencies and of the functional relationships between factors and receptors, such as the promiscuity of neurotrophin-3 or the identification of c-ret as a GDNF receptor. Her studies as an independent researcher focus on the niche biology of neural stem cells (NSCs). Her group described the first «angiocrine» factor, the so-called PEDF, whose actions contributed to establishing that blood vessels are a key element of neurogenic niches. In addition, her group has contributed to establishing the concept of quiescence as an actively regulated state by identifying the actions of neurotrophin-3 as an angiocrine pro-quiescence factor, to uncover transcriptional functions of cell cycle regulatory molecules in the maintenance of NSCs or to define the role of cell adhesion in the regulation of their activation state, among others. She has been a member of the boards of the Spanish Society of Neuroscience, the Spanish Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, and the International Society of Differentiation and is now board member of the Spanish Society of Developmental Biology. Her group belongs to the Center for Biomedical Research in Network on Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIBERNED), the National Cell Therapy Network (TerCel), the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine of the University of Valencia (BIOTECMED) and is Prometheus Group of Excellence of the Valencian Community. She was appointed member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2013 and chosen by the Fundación Botín-Banco Santander to be part of her science program to encourage technological transfer in 2014.

Number of six-year terms (sexenios) awarded: 5 (last: 2015). Number of doctoral theses supervised: 11 (plus 7 in progress). Articles published with citations: 117. Total number of citations: 11,798 (WOS), 16,060 (Google Scholar). Average number of citations per article: 101. Index h: 47 (WOS), 49 (Google Scholar). I10 Index: 77. Number of postdocs supervised: 15.

Dra. África González Fernández

Catedrática de Inmunología (Universidad de Vigo) y académica de la RAFG. Es Doctora en Medicina y Cirugía (Univ. Alcalá de Henares, Madrid), Especialista en Inmunología (Clínica Puerta de Hierro (Madrid). Fue Directora del Centro de Investigaciones Biomédicas (CINBIO) (2009 -2019) y Presidenta de la Sociedad Española de Inmunología (2016-2020). Lidera un grupo de investigación multidisciplinar en inmunología básica y aplicada, con publicaciones relevantes. Copromotora de la empresa spin-off NanoImmunoTech. Ha recibido premios por su trayectoria científica y profesional y es autora del libro divulgativo INMUNO POWER: Conoce y fortalece tus defensas.

Dr. Ivo G. Gut

Dr. Gut is Director of the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG), one of the largest genome sequencing center in Europe which handles around 400 projects of external collaborators per year, many from study design, to sequencing and bioinformatic analysis. From 1999 to 2009 he established, at the Centre National de Génotypage (CNG), the highest throughput genotyping platform in Europe, where he executed many genome-wide association studies and was the coordinator of the EU-funded Project READNA in which 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation nucleic acid analysis technologies were developed. At CNAG, he leads the Biomedical Genomics Group, he is principal investigator of the ongoing EU-funded projects Beyond 1M Genomes, 3TR , BCLL@las, EUCanCan, B-Cast, Rare-ILD, EJP-RD, PECAN, ImmuCan, Screen4Care, and was coordinator of RD-Connect (part of the International Rare Disease Research Consortium) which tackle important health problems. Currently, he coordinates EASI-Genomics, an EU Infrastructure Project. He is very active in large international projects and consortia such as the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC), the International Human Genome Consortium (IHEC), and the International Rare Disease Research Consortium (IRDiRC). He has developed several important methods for DNA, RNA and DNA methylation analysis and is author of more than 400 research papers, 11 reviews and 12 book chapters, cited over 54 000 times, inventor of 26 patents or patent applications, founder of 4 biotech start-ups, and serves on numerous international advisory boards.

Dr. M. Angela Nieto

Angela Nieto received her PhD in 1987 (Universidad Autónoma, UAM, Madrid) after working on protein-nucleic acid interactions in nucleosomes and ribosomes. After postdoctoral stays at Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas (CSIC-UAM) working on programmed cell death and the National Institute for Medical Research in London, working on the development of the nervous system, in 1993, she obtained a position of Staff Scientist at the Cajal Institute in Madrid. From then on, she has led a research group interested in studying cell movements and plasticity. In particular, her group pioneered the study of the epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) in development, in particular in the neural crest, and revealed a tight connection between this embryonic process and cancer. Her main contribution has been the impact that the reactivation of developmental programs has in adult disease, including tumour progression and fibrosis.
She is currently Full Professor at CSIC, President of the International Society of Developmental Biology, Vicechair of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Council, scientific delegate for Spain at EMBL and EMBC Councils from 2010 and Member of CSIC advisory Science & Technology Committee (CCA). She was elected EMBO member in 2000, Member of the Academy of Europe in 2009, of the Royal Academy of Sciences (Spain) in 2019, the Latin-American Academy of Sciences in 2020 and of the French Académie des Sciences in 2022. She has gathered over 40.000 citations to her more than 140 publications. She has been invited to talk at more than 150 scientific meetings and to give more that 160 seminars or conferences in over 25 different countries. She is currently member of the Editorial Boards of EMBO J, Curr Op Genetics & Development; Trends in Genetics; Int. J. Dev Biol and Seminars in Cancer Biology, and belongs to more than 10 scientific advisory boards of institutions across Spain and Europe. Among other awards, she has received the “Carmen and Severo Ochoa Prize” (2004), “Prize Francisco Cobos Foundation” in Biomedical Research (2005); “Alberto Sols” to best research career (2008), “Rey Jaime I” in Basic Research (2009); Scientific Merit recognition from the Generalitat Valenciana (2015); Basic Research Prize in Nephrology “Iñigo Alvarez de Toledo” (2016); Mexico Prize in Science and Technology (2017); Lilly Foundation Award in Preclinical Research (2018), ASEICA Cancer Research Award (2018); Ramón y Cajal National Research Prize (2019) and L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Award (2021).

Dr. Maria-José Sánchez-Pérez

Dr. Sánchez studied Medicine and received her doctorate from the University of Granada in 1996 after specializing in Clinical Microbiology and Parasitology (MIR 1993-1996). She obtained further qualification of an Expert in Epidemiology and Clinical Research from the University of Granada (UGR, 2000), an Expert Health promotion in health, educational and social contexts (UGR, 2018) and an Expert in Bioethics (UGR, 2021). In 1997, Dr. Sánchez joined the Andalusian School of Public Health (EASP) as a research and technical fellow part of the Granada Cancer Registry. Since 2003, she has worked as a professor in the school, serving as the Director of Research from 2007 to 2016 and the Director of the Cancer Registry of Granada since 2009. She was Scientific Deputy Director of the Biomedical Research Institute of Granada (ibs.GRANADA) since 2017-2020 and since 2020, she is Scientific Director of the ibs.GRANADA.

Dr Sánchez has extensive experience in the design and development of epidemiological studies and research projects related to the etiology, patterns of care, and survival of cancer patients, having led and/or collaborated in more than 35 research projects at the European, national, and regional level. The results of these projects have been reflected in more than 250 publications in the past 5 years. Dr. Sánchez is a Principal Investigator of a research group of the CIBER of Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP), of a research group of the Biomedical Research Institute of Granada (ibs.GRANADA), and of the PAIDI Research Group «Public Health Research and Health Services». Since December 2017, she has been the coordinator of the Epidemiology and Control of Chronic Diseases Program at CIBERESP. Dr. Sánchez coordinated the evaluation panel of Epidemiology and Public Health of the Call for Research of the Ministry of Health of the Andalusian Regional Government and was the deputy of the Evaluation Committee of the Commission for the evaluation of the call for research projects in Primary Care of the Andalusian Health Service. She has also been an evaluator of ANEP since 2007. As a professor, Dr Sánchez participated and coordinated the University Expert in Epidemiology and Clinical Research of the University of Granada and other face-to-face or virtual courses related to epidemiology, research methodology, population cancer registries, cancer prevention, genetic counseling and hereditary cancer, etc. She was a professor of the Inter-university Doctoral Program in Health Sciences of the Universities of Seville, Jaén, and the EASP, and was part of the Academic Committee of this Doctoral Program. She is professor of the PhD Program Clinical Medicine and Public Health of the University of Granada since 2019.

She has been president of the Spanish Network of Population Cancer registers (REDECAN, 2014-2017), Spanish coordinator of the EPIC-Spain study, and advisor to the Directorate of the Comprehensive Oncology Plan of Andalucía since 2015. She is the representative of Spain in the GRELL Steering Committee and in the Steering Committee of the European High resolution Studies on Cancer. She was elected member of the Steering Committee of the European Cancer Registry Network (2017-2020).

She has been recognized as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Granada since 2019 and she is member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Pfizer-University of Granada-Junta de Andalucía Centre for Genomics and Oncological Research (GENYO) since 2022.