Malumbres, Marcos
ICREA Research Professor at Vall d'Hebron Institut d'Oncologia (VHIO).
Life & Medical Sciences
Short biography
Marcos Malumbres studied Biology at the Universidad de Navarra and obtained the PhD by the Universidad de León in 1993. During his postdoctoral training at the New York University Medical Center, he studied the effect of oncogenes in cell cycle control and proliferation. In 1998, He joined M. Barbacid’s lab in the newly created Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) in Madrid. He obtained a Staff Scientist position at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and was appointed senior group leader at CNIO in 2004. Dr. Malumbres has authored more than 200 international articles including relevant contributions on the function of key cell cycle regulators and their relevance in cancer therapy. He was elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2016 and received the Gold Medal of the Spanish Association against Cancer (AECC) in 2019. He is a visiting Professor of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute-Harvard University in Boston since 2019.
Research interests
Marcos’ lab focuses on the mechanisms that control cell differentiation and proliferation and their implications in pathology. His group is interested in molecules that drive tumor cell proliferation and the therapeutic opportunities of inhibiting their activity in cancer. Past research in the last years led to the approval of inhibitors of cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6 (CDK4/6) in breast cancer therapy. Yet, these inhibitors are not efficient in other tumor types and understanding how cells drive the cell cycle in the absence of CDK4/6 activity is a major goal in his lab. Recent efforts in his lab also focus on therapeutic opportunities in genomically unstable tumors, as well as generating a platform of patient-derived samples in which genetics, biochemistry and single-cell studies can be combined to develop and test efficacious therapeutic strategies to be translated to the clinic.