During my Ph.D. studies in the group of Joan Roig (IRB), I focused on the role of the Nek6-Nek7-Nek9 signaling module in mitosis regulation mitosis.
For my postdoctoral experience, I joined the group of Stefan Kubicek (CeMM), where I focused on the generation of reporter cell lines to monitor the activity of epigenetic regulators needed for cancer progression. By using such reporters, I identified an unexpected nuclear interaction module composed of an epigenetic reader and a metabolic enzyme, which is required to metabolically promote cancer-associated transcriptional programs.
I was offered a Junior Group Leader position at CRG within the Genome Biology program and I joined the Institute in January 2019. My group aims to discover the interactions between metabolism and epigenetics and how such interactions support cancer proliferation. The fundamental importance of our research has been recognized by the ERC, which warded me with an ERC Starting Grant (2019). Metabolism plays a major role in supporting cancer cell proliferation. However, the connection between cancer metabolism and epigenetics has remained elusive. Future investigation of the epigenetics-metabolism intersection will increase our understanding of the molecular interactions regulating cancer proliferation, which will result in the generation of scientific knowledge that might open up new opportunities for cancer therapy.