ICREA Research Professor, ERC Advanced Grant
Since 2004, working as a Research Professor at ICREA (Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies) and Principal Investigator and Programme Coordinator at the Cancer Science Programme at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona).
1994-1999 PhD fellow at Institut Municipal de Investigació Mèdica (IMIM). 1993 BSc. Universitat de Barcelona. 1999: Associate professor in Biochemistry –Life Siciences at the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. 1999- 2000 PostDoctoral Fellow at Miguel Beato’s group- Institut für Molekularbiologie und Tumorforschung, Marburg. Germany. 2000-2004: PostDoctoral Fellow at Hans Clevers Lab, Netherlands Institute for Developmental Biology, Utrecht, NL.
Over the past 20 years, my laboratory has investigated the mechanisms governing colorectal cancer (CRC) initiation and progression. Our pioneering studies have systematically characterized the architecture of CRC and revealed key aspects of the stem cell hierarchy dominating the development of this malignancy. More recently, we identified the cell of origin of metastatic relapse in CRC (Cañellas-Socias et al. Nature. 2022). We have also made groundbreaking discoveries to understand immune evasion, particularly the role of TGF-beta signaling in metastatic CRC. Each of the papers we published on this topic (Calon et al. Cancer Cell. 2012; Calon et al. Nature Genetics. 2015; Tauriello et al. Nature. 2018) has received over a thousand citations and are considered landmark studies that inspired the work of many other laboratories worldwide. In collaboration with the pharma industry, we have translated our findings into new therapeutic tools to target cancer stem cells and the TGF-beta pathway, some of which are showing promising results in clinical trials. My laboratory is now interested in understanding how metastases evolve over time and in developing approaches to target tumor cell plasticity.