Alejo E. Rodriguez-Fraticelli was born in Argentina and studied at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. In 2008 he moved to Madrid where he studied Biochemistry, and he received his PhD in Developmental and Cell Biology at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in 2014. He then moved to Boston (USA) to work on cell fate determination in hematopoiesis at Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital. During his postdoctoral fellowship, Alejo worked on developing methods for single cell lineage tracing in the hematopoietic system. His work contributed to a recent modern revision of the paradigm of unperturbed in vivo hematopoiesis, demonstrating the coexistence of multiple lineage hierarchies with imprinted and biased cellular fates.
Alejo pioneered various methods for measuring single cell lineages in combination with single-cell transcriptomics, a revolutionary way to connect cellular states with fates through clonal analysis. In 2021, Alejo moved to IRB Barcelona, where he now heads the Quantitative Stem Cell Dynamics lab, and since 2023, he is an ICREA Research Professor.
Alejo’s work at IRB Barcelona focuses on the developmental origins of stem cell heterogeneity and its consequences for immune cell aging and cancer initiation. In 2024, the group made two seminal discoveries: first, that some somatic epimutations are highly stable through time, enabling stem cell lineage tracing across the lifespan, and second, that different pre-existing stem cell states can be major drivers of cancer phenotypic heterogeneity.