El jueves 21 de abril el ISPA acogerá la conferencia Challenges and opportunities for macrophage modulation in lung cancer, de la Dra. María Casanova, que forma parte del ciclo de conferencias sobre cáncer que el Instituto organiza con el patrocinio de Janssen. La charla tendrá lugar en la Sala N-1 S2 006 del HUCA a partir de las 13:00 h. La entrada es libre hasta completar el aforo.
Presentación de la ponente
Dr. Casanova-Acebes was recently appointed Assistant Professor at Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO) where she leads the laboratory of Cancer Immunity. She received her PhD under the supervision of Dr. Andrés Hidalgo at the CNIC; which was awarded the best PhD thesis in her department in 2014. Her PhD studies focused in understanding neutrophil aging mechanisms and hematopoietic stem and progenitor trafficking (this work was published in Cell, 2013). She also identified for the first-time that neutrophils infiltrate the tissues in non-inflammatory conditions, which in turn regulates peripheral hematopoietic and cancer cell migration.
After a very successful PhD she moved to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York for her postdoc under the supervision of Dr. Miriam Merad laboratory. During her postdoctoral research Dr. Casanova-Acebes studied the role of macrophage ontogeny in lung adenocarcinoma, breast and ovarian cancer. In her studies she discovered that macrophages of different origin have a distinct temporal and spatial distribution in the tumor microenvironment.
Her most recent work (published in Nature 2021) highlights the key contribution of very specialized subset of macrophages to tumor outcome, and uncovers novel macrophage determinants of tumor immunity, which will the focus of her talk today. She will also present unpublished data of her new research focus on macrophage-fibroblast crosstalk in lung cancer.
She has received several invitations to the most prestigious international and national conferences, awards and grants. Among them, she is an awardee of the 2020 AACR-AstraZeneca Immuno-oncology Research Fellowship and the 2021 PostDoc Talent Award from the Cris Contra el Cancer Foundation. She is also an awardee of the Ramón y Cajal program.
Her laboratory at CNIO aims to uncover the role of myeloid cells in metastasis initiation and progression in solid tumours utilizing genetically-engineered murine models and patient biopsies, single-cell technologies and high-resolution imaging.
