Marta García López

Researcher Marta Garcia graduated in Biotechnology and Biochemistry in 2007 from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and obtained her PhD in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biomedicine in 2013 (UAB) thanks to a scholarship from the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (Barcelona). In 2016, the UAB itself awarded her an Extraordinary Doctoral Award for her thesis based on the generation and characterization of metastatic models in prostate cancer.

In 2014, she joined the New Therapeutic Strategies in Neuroblastoma Group of the Sant Joan de Déu Research Institute as a postdoctoral researcher under the direction of Dr. Carmen de Torres. Later, in 2019, she joined the Translational Genomics Group led by Dr. Cinzia Lavarino. In 2023, Dr. Garcia established her own line of research within the group as an Emerging Principal Investigator and is currently part of the group's management, together with Dr. Lavarino. Her scientific interest includes the development of new strategies to treat neuroblastic tumors, in particular, the most aggressive and chemoresistant ones that escape current standard treatment, but also in the study of new biomarkers for both diagnosis and prognosis focused on this type of tumor and other developmental tumors.

During her research career, she has co-authored numerous publications that have contributed to advancing the knowledge and understanding of developmental tumors through the identification of new biomarkers and classifiers, therapeutic targets, resistance mechanisms as well as characterization of the tumor microenvironment and metastatic niches, responding to unmet medical needs in pediatrics. His expertise focuses on advanced molecular laboratory techniques, analysis and interpretation of multi-omic data, molecular signatures, and functional assays (in vitro/animal models), always with a strong translational orientation.