Annual Scientific Report

Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)
The Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, ICREA) is a
foundation that is supported by both the Catalan Government through the Catalan Ministry of Innovation, Universities and
Enterprise (Departament d’Innovació, Universitats i Empresa, DIUiE), and the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation
(Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca i la Innovació, FCRI).
Through its programme for contracting of senior investigators, ICREA reinforces the principal Catalan research institutions.
The IDIBAPS has four ICREA investigators that contribute knowledge, experience and leadership for the teams to
which they have been incorporated:
Dr. Josep M. Llovet
Translational research group in liver oncology
The Translation research group in liver oncology was created in 2006 by Dr. Josep M. Llovet, ICREA
Research Professor of the DIBAPS-Hospital Clínic and Professor of Medicine of the Mount Sinai
School of Medicine. The group is composed of 8 people from the IDIBAPS and leads an international
consortium on genomic research in liver cancer, the HCC Genomic Consortium, with about
30 investigators. In 2009 it received the AACR-Landon International Innovator Award, and was acknowledged
as a Singular Research Group by the Catalan Government. In 2010 the group received
a European Project, FP-7-HEALTH (HEPTROMIC), involving the coordination of 6 academic centres
and two companies, with the purpose of identifying new oncogenes and treatment targets.
The fundamental contributions of the group during these years
have been the following:
• Definition of a molecular classification of hepatocellular carcinoma
(Chang, Can Res, 2008; Hoshida, Cancer Res 2009).
• Identification of key oncogenes in hepatocarcinogenesis, such
as miRNA Let-7 (Viswanathan, Nature Genetics 2009), EGF
and c-MET (Keng, Nature Biotech 2009), AEG-1 (Yoo, J Clin
Invest, 2009) and the signalling pathway of IGFR1 (Tovar, J
Hepatol 2010).
Dr. Albert Pol
Cell proliferation and signalling
The aim of our project is to characterize - in health and in illness - the cellular processes that
are regulated or altered due to lipid accumulation within the cells. All prokaryote and eukaryote
cells maintain the evolutive competence of accumulating lipids in organelles known as
intracellular lipid bodies. In healthy cells, a small population of lipid bodies is present at all
times, though these organelles become abundant in response to different physiopathological
conditions such as obesity, diabetes, fatty liver disease (steatosis), liver cirrhosis, viral hepatitis,
arteriosclerosis and even cancer. Globally, these disorders affect over half of the population
in western countries. Recent advances in the cellular biology of lipid bodies have shown
the latter to be multifunctional organelles that are metabolically very active and thus constitute
key elements in the complex system of lipids and proteins in constant movement within the cells.
Dr. Antonio Postigo
Transcriptional regulation of genic expression laboratory
The laboratory investigates mechanisms involved in the regulation of genic expression during cell differentiation and in
cancer, using as models the ZEB transcription factors. The ZEB1 and ZEB2 proteins regulate key events during embryonic
development, the truncal maintenance of normal stem cells and cancer cells, the differentiation of many tissues, tumour
invasion, and metastasis.
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