Imaging and targeting premetastatic niches and immune modulators in melanoma

A Lola and John Grace Distinguished Lecture in Cancer Research
This seminar will also be televised to AGORA Auditorium Paternot + Biopôle B301/CLE + Geneva University TBC

María S. (Marisol) Soengas is the Head of the Melanoma Group and the Dean for Academic Affairs at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) in Madrid. The long-term goal of her team is to translate basic research in melanoma into the clinic by identifying novel tumour markers and drug targets. The interest of Soengas for melanoma stemmed from her studies as a postdoctoral fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (NY). There, she performed the first functional characterization of apoptotic factors as melanoma suppressors and chemoresistance mediators. She then decided to incorporate patient biopsies to her projects on cellular and animal models of melanoma. To this end, she joined the Department of Dermatology at the University of Michigan, which hosts one of the largest Multidisciplinary Melanoma Clinics in the US. As an Assistant Professor, her group further defined novel roles of additional stress response programs (involving autophagy, senescence and endosome mobilization). In 2008 she moved to the CNIO, setting up a multidisciplinary laboratory which has now expanded to ambitious national and international networks. Examples of recent discoveries of her group are the identification of a cluster of endolysosomal factors that are selectively enriched in melanoma and distinguish this disease from over 35 tumor types. Non-invasive imaging of pre-metastatic niches is also being developed by her team as a cost-effective platform for drug screening and pharmacokinetic analyses. To facilitate the transfer of knowledge from the bench to the bedside, Soengas cofounded Bioncotech Therapeutics, a spin off of the CNIO involved in the clinical development of proprietary dsRNA-based nanocomplexes of her group. Soengas participates in multiple review panels, and is member of the editorial boards of various journals. She has received fellowships and awards from the Human Frontiers in Science Program, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America, the American Dermatology Foundation, the Elsa V. Pardee Foundation, the V Foundation for Cancer Research. She also received the Dana Ashby Young Investigator Award of the Society for Melanoma Research, and is a Team Science Project Leader of the Melanoma Research Alliance