Chillón Rodríguez, Miguel
ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).
Life & Medical Sciences
Short biography
Born in Barcelona in 1966. PhD in Genetics at Hospital Duran i Reynals, Universitat de Barcelona (1994). Award in Human Genetics by the Spanish Association of Human Genetics (1995). HHMI postdoctoral fellow on Gene Therapy for Cystic Fibrosis, at the Internal Medicine Dept, University of Iowa, USA (1994-97). EMBO fellow in Genethon III (Evry, France) (1997-99) on viral vectors for Gene Therapy. Postdoctoral fellow on Gene Therapy (2000-2001) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). ICREA Research Professor at the UAB since 2001. Director of the Vector Production Unit, since 2004, and Assistant Professor of the UAB since 2005. He has published more than 80 papers, generated 13 patents, and co-founded 2 spin-offs in biotechnology: NanoTherapix (2009) and Kogenix Therapeutics (2016). Dr Chillon is currently the Chair of the ATMP platform of EATRIS, a strategic European ERIC entity, as well as the coordinator of the Advance Therapy Program (composed by 23 groups) of VHIR.
Research interests
Medicine still has many challenges to solve especially on complex diseases where a large number of both, genetic and environmental factors, are involved. Among them, aging-associated diseases and rare disorders have attracted attention because there are no effective curative treatments for them. Some of these diseases affecting the nervous system, which in addition is difficult to access and to manipulate with classical pharmacological treatments. To address these problems we have focused our research interests on three main objectives: (1) gene therapy strategies for diseases affecting the nervous system, such as rare neuromuscular and neurodegenerative disorders; (2) gene therapy strategies using chronokines for cognitive decline and dementia; and (3) development of more efficient and less immunogenic viral vectors. To determine the therapeutic potential of our research strategies we work with animal models and well as with iPS-derived neurons from biopsies taken from patients