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.

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.