Marta Cascante is Full Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at University of Barcelona (UB) and leader of the Integrative Systems Biology, Metabolomics and Cancer team. She holds a degree in chemistry and a PhD in biochemistry from UB, where she was distinguished with the Outstanding Graduate and Thesis Awards. She has authored over 200 publications, two of them cited in “Stryer” biochemistry textbook. She is partner of three European translational research projects (H2020) in the field of systems medicine and metabolomics and coordinator of several Spanish funded research projects. She is member of the editorial advisory boards of Metabolomics and BMC systems Biology. She also served in the scientific committee of numerous international conferences. Marta Cascante has been distinguished with Icrea Academia Prize 2010 & 2015,  the Narcís Monturiol Medal 2015 and the Antoni Caparros Prize 2016 for scientific and knowledge transfer merits.

Research interests

My research focuses on cancer and metabolic diseases with the goal of elucidating the networks and pathways that are fundamental in their development and progression. More specifically, our team uses a Systems Medicine approach to identify key proteins in the metabolic reprogramming underlying multifactorial diseases, including cancer, to be used as biomarkers or drug targets. In the coming years we plan to follow a multi-omic approach to construct genome-scale metabolic networks that accurately reflect short-term and long-term metabolic adaptations associated with metastasis and acquired therapeutic resistance. We expect to identify new biomarkers and drug targets at the metabolic level to overcome drug resistance and metastasis. Furthermore, we plan to develop and deploy an e-infrastructure that makes it feasible for healthcare researchers to process analyse and mine molecular phenotyping data, to facilitate large-scale data analysis in the coming age of Precision Medicine.

Keywords

Metabolic modelling, Metabolomics, Fluxomics, Systems Biology, Systems Medicine