PEBC Report - Programa de Epigenética y Biología del Cáncer

Dr Montse Sanchez-Cespedes
Genes and Cancer Group
Montse Sanchez-Cespedes was born in Badalona
(Barcelona) in 1968. She graduated in Biology and specialized
in Genetics and Molecular Biology from the Universitat
de Barcelona and carried out her Ph.D. work at the
Molecular Biology of Cancer Laboratory, the Hospital
”Germans Trias i Pujol” in Badalona. From 1997 to 2001 she
was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine (Baltimore-USA). She focused on the
identification of novel genetic and molecular alterations in
cancer. More specifically she looked for recurrent chromosomal
abnormalities in lung tumours and genetically
analysed candidate tumour suppressor genes in these
regions. From October 2001 to 2004 she lead the lung cancer
biological research at the CNIO and from 2004 to
September 2008 she was the Group Leader of the Lung
Cancer Group at the same institution.
She is member of international scientific societies and
reviewer for many journals and funding agencies. Her list of
over 60 original publications and reviews in international and
peer-reviewed journals of prestige serves as a testament of
the experience she has already accumulated in the field of
cancer research. Her current research is devoted to the
identification of genes that are genetically altered in tumors
and to the functional analysis of their implication in cancer
development.
The complete genetic characterization of tumours is important
not only to understand tumour biology, but also to the
development of new drugs and to the selection of patients
that may benefit of a given targeted cancer therapy. The
promise of using proteins encoded by mutant cancer genes
as molecular targets for the development of novel therapies
drives endeavours to identify novel mutated cancer genes as
well as to create catalogues of somatic mutations in cancer.
Our current projects in the laboratory are focused in the following
directions:
i) to identify novel genes altered in cancer;
ii) to understand their contribution to cancer development
and
iii) to investigate correlations with clinical and pathological
characteristics.
Genome-wide screenings allow the identification of the
chromosomal regions that are frequently deleted in cancer
and that may contain tumor suppressor genes. In lung cancer,
one of the most frequently deleted chromosomal arms
Postdoctoral researchers: Eva Pros,
Salvador Rodriguez-Nieto
PhD Students: Ester Bonastre, Sandra Castillo,
Rossana G Restani, Octavio Romero
Technician: Albert Coll
is 19p. During the past years we unveiled that LKB1, the
Peutz-Jeghers syndrome (PJS) gene, was also
mutated/inactivated in lung cancer. This exciting observation
led us to devote intense efforts to fully understand how
LKB1 inactivation contributes to carcinogenesis. To date we
have provided important data on the mutational profile of
LKB1 in lung cancer and on its association with various
molecular and clinic-pathological characteristics. We also
provided further insights in the relationship between LKB1
alterations in lung cancer and impaired AMPK activity and
mTOR inhibition upon energetic stress. BRG1 is another
gene that allocates on chromosome 19p and encodes and
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