My tasks are included in the healthcare and research areas, developed in the Hospital Universitario de Navarra and Navarrabiomed, respectively. In the first area I work as the the responsible of the Molecular Pathology Lab at the Department of Pathology (Hospital Universitario de Navarra, Servicio Navarro de Salud) where we analyze the validated biomarkers for diagnosis and prediction of response to oncologic treatments of patients with different types of cancer (breast, lung and colorectal cancer, melanomas,brain tumours,...) from the public hospitals in Navarra (Hospital Complex of Navarra and Hospital Reina Sofía).
We also incorporate the analysis of new biomarkers by different methodologies and the results obtained at this lab are used for immediate clinical decision. In the research area I lead the Molecular Pathology research group in Navarrabiomed, composed by basic researchers, pathologists and clinicians devoted to find new epigenetic alterations with diagnostic, prognostic or predictive value in cancer, mainly breast, colorectal and gynaeocological cancers.
The epigenetic mechanisms we consider are gene hypermethylation, deregulation of miRNA expression, and acetylation of histones, and the technical approach include molecular techniques (global methylation and miRNA expression,pyrosequencing, ...) for the study of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) and protein, and in vitro techniques, for the development of functional studies (proliferation, invasion, migration,...).
