Oncology

Hugo Arasanz: specialist in Medical Oncology, specialized in thoracic oncology and central nervous system tumors, and Doctor of Health Sciences from the Public University of Navarra (2020). He actively participates in clinical trials, some of them as principal investigator, and was coordinator of the FER-FEN-2019-01 trial. In recent years he has participated in different basic/translational research projects with competitive funding, two of them as principal investigator, focused on cancer immunotherapy, biomarker studies, as well as treatment resistance and molecular pathways. He has more than 50 publications in indexed journals, with an h-index of 21.

Imanol Arozarena completed his PhD in Dr. Piero Crespo's laboratory at the University of Cantabria, where he studied the RAS/MAPK pathway. He subsequently, pursued postdoctoral research at the Institute of Cancer Research in London (2006-2009) and at the University of Manchester (2010-2014), where he worked on melanoma skin cancer in the laboratories of Dr. Richard Marais and Dr. Claudia Wellbrock. During this period, Dr. Arozarena focused on the mechanisms of metastatic dissemination and resistance to targeted therapies of tumor cells. After two years working as a professor and Principal Investigator at the University of Huddersfield, he established the Cancer Signaling Unit at Navarrabiomed where he continued his research on melanoma. In the last 8 years he has also developed other research lines focused on brain tumors such as glioblastoma multiforme and metastatic breast cancer. Currently, the Cancer Signaling Unit focuses on investigating the molecular mechanisms and metabolic adaptation that tumor cells develop in response to therapies commonly used in clinical practice such as radiotherapy and immunotherapy.

I comleted my PhD at the Biomedical Research Centre of the Navarra Health Service, under the supervision of Dr Garcia-Foncillas (Department of Oncology, CUN) and Dr Lera (Department of Surgery, Hospital of Navarra). My PhD research was on the mutator phenotype and prognosis in colorectal cancer patients. I received training in the prestigious PEBC-IDIBELL, headed by Dr Manel Esteller, where I learned basic techniques for epigenetic studies and collaborated in a study of the involvement of epigenetic alterations of the WRN gene (PNAS, 2006) and MBD family proteins in cancer (Oncogene, 2008). My current duties cover the areas of research and healthcare, respectively. In the research area, I lead Molecular Pathology Research Group in Navarrabiomed, dedicated to identifying novel epigenetic alterations with diagnostic, prognostic or predictive value in cancer, especially breast, colorectal and gynaecological cancers. We study gene hypermethylation, deregulation of miRNA expression, and histone acetylation by molecular techniques (global methylation and miRNA expression, pyrosequencing, etc.) for the study of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) and protein, and in vitro techniques for functional studies (proliferation, invasion, etc.). The Group has received competitive funding from regional (Health and Industry Departments, Government of Navarra), national (MINECO) and European (RefBio,
 
RefBioII, Onconet-Interreg Sudoe) sources, among other funding agencies. We have made significant discoveries of epigenetic alterations of prognostic value in brain tumours, and breast and gynaecological cancers. I am the President of the Scientific Committee of the Navarrabiomed Tumour Biobank since 2013. In the area of diagnosis and healthcare, I have been the Head of the Molecular Pathology Laboratory in the Department of Pathology since 2009. We analyse the validated biomarkers for the diagnosis and prediction of response to cancer treatments of patients with solid tumours by different methodologies including NGS. The results obtained in our laboratory are used for immediate clinical decision-making.