Biologist and ICREA Research Professor Núria López-Bigas will join the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) at the Barcelona Science Park (PCB) in November as a new Group Leader. Her laboratory brings the number of research groups at IRB Barcelona to 23, a number which will grow again in March 2017 with the arrival of Fran Supek another researcher in the bioinformatics and genomics of cancer.

Biologist and ICREA Research Professor Núria López-Bigas (Monistrol de Montserrat, 1975) will join the IRB Barcelona after 10 years of leading a laboratory at the Pompeu Fabra University. Her group develops computational models to identify the genetic alterations that cause tumours to form. López-Bigas is the recipient of a 5-year grant from the European Research Council (ERC), she belongs to a European consortium within the Horizon2020 programme, she holds a Plan Nacional grant the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity/FEDER funds, and receives support from the Spanish Cancer Association (AECC) and from the TV3 La Marató Foundation. She is the recent recipient of the Banco Sabadell Prize, an award that pays tribute to the quality and impact of her work. 

Among the advantages of her move to IRB Barcelona, López-Bigas includes the fact that she will be “surrounded by several other world-class groups in cancer research.” She will lead an interdisciplinary team of 14 that includes engineers, biologists, physicians and mathematicians. 

Núria López-Bigas’ “Biomedical Genomics” laboratory brings the number of research groups at IRB Barcelona to 23, a number which will grow again in March 2017 with the arrival of Fran Supek (Zagreb, Croatia, 1981), another researcher in the bioinformatics and genomics of cancer, currently a postdoctal fellow at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG).

Fran Supek holds a Bachelor’s and PhD degrees in Molecular Biology from the Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics from the University of Zagreb (Croatia). He arrived in Barcelona in 2010 to take up a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the CRG. He studies the genomes of human tumours in the group of Ben Lehner, which analyzes the genomic signatures that play a role in tumour generation, as well as in the origin of mutations themselves. Supek’s  research has produced 29 scientific publications, on 18 of which he is first or corresponding author, appearing in journals such as Cell (2014), Nature (2015) and Nature Genetics (2016). He is the inventor of a patent, and participated in the creation of the spin-off companyBioZyne in 2004.

His scientific objectives at IRB Barcelona will be to unravel the mechanisms that underlie different mutational processes at play in the human genome, the consequences that these mutations have in the development of cancer, and the therapeutic potential that they represent.

The recruitment of Supek is a clear demonstration of IRB Barcelona’s commitment to recruiting young talent with potential for excellence, and to offering leadership opportunities to young scientists.
 

• More information on IRB Barcelona web site [+]