Joaquín Arribas

Joaquín Arribas

Parc de Salut Mar

Life & Medical Sciences

Dr. Arribas completed his B.Sc. studies in Biochemistry at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 1987, where he also got his Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology in 1992, working on proteasome regulation. Sponsored by a fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, he joined the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, USA (1992-96), working on the proteolytic processing of transmembrane growth factors. After his post-doc, he joined the oncology department at Hospital Vall d'Hebron in Barcelona in 1997 as a Staff Scientist and has since led the Growth Factors research group. In 2010, he was appointed VHIO's director of the Preclinical Research Program and CIBERONC's Scientific director in 2017. He resigned from both positions to become director of the Hospital del Mar Institute for Medical Investigations (IMIM) and lead the Growth Factors group at VHIO, and the Immune Redirection group at IMIM.

Research interests

As the leader of a multicenter research team, Dr. Arribas' research interests center on HER2+ cancers and senescence's role in cancer onset and metastasis, with a primary focus on breast cancer. 

More specifically, the research activities conducted by his team are:

  • Develop novel therapeutic strategies to treat breast and pancreatic cancer.
  • Evaluate anticancer treatments (including immune redirection) in patient-derived cancer xenografts and identify resistance mechanisms to current therapies.
  • Develop and characterize CAR-T cell-based therapies against tumor-specific antigens in preclinical models.
  • Characterize cellular senescence's role in breast cancer progression and treatment.

Selected publications

- Adam-Artigues A, Arenas EJ, Martínez-Sabadell A, et al. 2022, 'Targeting HER2-AXL heterodimerization to overcome resistance to HER2 blockade in breast cancer', Sci Adv, 8(20):eabk2746.

- Martínez-Sabadell A, Arenas EJ, Arribas J, 2022, 'IFNγ Signaling in Natural and Therapy-Induced Antitumor Responses.Clin Cancer Res. 28(7):1243-1249.

- Martínez-Sabadell A, Morancho B, Rius Ruiz I, Román Alonso M, Ovejero Romero P, Escorihuela M, Chicote I, Palmer HG, Nonell L, Alemany-Chavarria M, Klein C, Bacac M, Arribas J, Arenas EJ. 2022, 'The target antigen determines the mechanism of acquired resistance to T cell-based therapies.' Cell Rep, 41(3), 111430.

- Martínez-Sabadell A, Ovejero Romero P, Arribas J, Arenas EJ. 2022, 'Protocol to generate a patient derived xenograft model of acquired resistance to immunotherapy in humanized mice.STAR Protoc 3(4), 101712.

- Duro-Sánchez S, Nadal-Serrano M, Lalinde-Gutiérrez M, et al. 2022, 'Therapy-Induced Senescence Enhances the Efficacy of HER2-Targeted Antibody-Drug Conjugates in Breast Cancer.Cancer Res, 4670-4679.

- Pérez-Núñez I, Rozalén C, Palomeque JÁ, et al. 2022, 'LCOR mediates interferon-independent tumor immunogenicity and responsiveness to immune-checkpoint blockade in triple-negative breast cancer', Nat Cancer, 3(3):355-370.

- Pellegrino B, Herencia-Ropero A, Llop-Guevara A, et al. 2022, 'Preclinical In Vivo Validation of the RAD51 Test for Identification of Homologous Recombination-Deficient Tumors and Patient Stratification', Cancer Res, 82(8):1646-1657.