Marta Cascante holds a chemistry degree and PhD in Biochemistry. From 2003 she is full Prof. of Biochemistry and Director of the research team “Integrative Systems Biology, Metabolomics & Cancer” at Barcelona University-IBUB and at CIBEREHD-ISCIII. She has been granted three times with the ICREA  Academia award, the Antoni Caparros (2016) award, and the Narcis Monturiol Medal (2015). She has published over 300 articles and supervised over 35 PhD students. Her research focusses on studying the metabolism and its alterations associated with pathologies such as metastatic cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and Covid19, in order to contribute to the development of new personalized therapies. She has also contributed to the development of metabolomics, fluxomics and systems medicine as co-founder of the European Society of Systems Medicine and the Spanish Society of Metabolomics. Her group participates in various international consortiums and Marie Curie training networks.

Research interests

My research is on the field of Integrative Biochemistry with a focus on systems biology, metabolomics, and fluxomics. We have been performing cutting-edge interdisciplinary research in the field of metabolic alterations associated with multifactorial diseases and drug discovery. The main goal has been to contribute to the understanding of the complete breadth of metabolic abnormalities in multifactorial diseases and to identify novel therapeutic targets and predictive biomarkers. We identified and validated targetable metabolic vulnerabilities for metastatic colon cancer (Càncers 2022) and we demonstrated a key role of PDK1 in AML, unveiling that lactate-fuelled respiration is a vulnerable metabolic flexibility in FLT3-ITD+ subtype (Nature Communications 2022). We patented a pharmaceutical combination targeting CDK4/6 and glutaminase -PCT/EP2016/067524 and a Transcriptomic Signature (IMMETCOLS) to stratify solid tumors and predict response to immune checkpoint inhibitors-EP21382772.

Keywords

Metabolism, Fluxomics, Metabolic modelling, Systems Medicine