Alvaro Aytes

I am a Group Leader at the Department of Molecular Mechanisms and Experimental Therapies in Oncology (ONCOBELL) at IDIBELL, Principal Investigator, Program Against Cancer Therapeutic Resistance (ProCURE) IDIBELL and ICO joint initiative. Member, and Prostate Cancer Functional Unit, Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge. My laboratory aims at uncovering new mechanisms driving cancer progression and metastasis and to elucidate how these mechanisms contribute to the emergence of therapeutic resistance. The lab´s main focus is on prostate cancer utilizing genetically-engineered mice (GEM) to model relevant molecular alterations, thereby recapitulating the progression pathway observed in human prostate cancer. In addition, our lab utilizes gene regulatory network-based approaches to conduct cross-species studies to identify actionable targets that can be validated in preclinical models. I obatained my Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Pathology from Universtiy of Barcelona in 2008 and in 2009 I joined the laboratory of Dr. Abate-Shen as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University (New York) working on developing genetically-engineered mouse models and computational approaches to uncover acctionable driver mechanisms in prostate cancer. In 2015 I was recruited as faculty at the joint initiative from IDIBELL and the Catalan Institute of Oncology to launch the Program Against Cancer Therapeutic Resistance.