Integrantes

Breve descripción del grupo

We are an ambitious, interdisciplinary, highly motivated young research group that officially started at IBGM in January 2015. We pursue developing an integrated research at the interface between cancer genetics / genomics, cellular biology, molecular pathology and clinical management of cancer patients. As the name of the group reveals, the main scientific query that drives our research is how molecular alterations  are passed along the different components of a tumor and how that influences on heterogeneity and plasticity of tumor cells. We want to comprehend how mutations arise in cancer cells and how they segregate in cancer cell subpopulations through space and time. Tumor heterogeneity is a pivotal condition in our understanding of tumor development and evolution. The analysis of individual cancer genomes has shown not only a puzzling inter-tumor heterogeneity, with limited somatic alterations shared between identical tumor histotypes, but also a complicated intra-tumor heterogeneity, affecting individual tumor areas within a particular tumor biopsy and biopsies of the same tumor separated in space and time. Sequential analysis of tumors during disease course (primary tumor, recurrences and metastases during follow-up) has unveiled that intra-tumoral heterogeneity also evolves during disease course. 

Tumor cells devise strategies to bypass the effect of small molecule cancer drugs. The selective pressure induced by targeted therapies directed against tumor cells bearing a particular mutation can result in the dominance of a minoritary sub-clon present in the tumor, which harbours molecular alterations resistant to the given drug or in the acquisition of additional driver mutations or molecular aberrations in the targeted clone or in new tumor subclones refractory to the inhibitor, that in either case raise the activity of alternate signaling pathways that rescue tumor growth and metastasis. It is important to trace the geography of clonal diversity or the subclonal architecture through treatment. To deliver curative therapies to cancer patients, will be essential to develop therapeutic algorithms that estimate inter-, and intra-tumoural heterogeneity and plasticity of cancer cells during tumor progression, influenced by the effects of treatments. Intra-tumoral heterogeneity is often a confounder in tumor evaluation for diagnosis and treatment.