Núria López-Bigas directs the Biomedical Genomics group of the Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), jointly with the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) and Pompeu Fabra University. She has been an ICREA professor since 2006, and has led her own research group since 2011. She has just received the Biomedical research Award granted by the Banc Sabadell Foundation.

At the beginning of this year you won a grant from the European Research Council and now you’ve just won the Banc Sabadell Foundation award for Biomedical Research. How do you manage to combine such a successful career with bringing up two daughters?

Working a lot and surrounding yourself with great people with whom you have an understanding and who are as thrilled with their work as you are. None of today’s scientists do the job alone. Prizes are nominal and I have been given this one, but I don’t do anything alone. We are a team of ten people, and we also collaborate with other groups and we are part of an international consortium. It is a task of collaboration with other people.

And how have you managed to reconcile  motherhood?

Having a lot of support at home and getting organized. Some days I work from home, this helps me reconcile. Sometimes I wake up at 6 in the morning and, before the girls wake up, I have already got ahead with work. It is a matter of making the most of the time you have.

And working hard, right?

I wouldn’t say hard, rather a lot of hours. It is not hard work, is a very nice job! Hard work would be doing something you don’t like or that requires physical wear and tear. You do research because you like it, enjoy it, and you don’t mind devoting a load of hours to it. Of course you need to be well organized , especially if you have family. But I don’t have the feeling of not devoting time to my daughters. I take them to school, can I pick them up a couple of days a week...

Do you think that this is possible for all women scientists?

The fact that I work in bioinformatics has made it a little easier for me. Not doing laboratory projects with animals or cells means it is easier to work from home: all you need is a computer and the Internet.  But it is a matter of being well organized. During pregnancy and at the beginning of maternity leave you must pose yourself  a project that adapts to your condition, you have to choose projects that you can do during this period.

You have to been really orderly to devote yourself to research.

In science it is very important to manage the time well. We have to try to be efficient because time is very limited.

Tell us about your scientific career!

I studied biology at the UB and I did my doctorate in Xavier Estivill’s group at the Cancer Research Institute studying deafness at the level of molecular genetics. When I finished my PhD I had wanted to do something new, different. Bioinformatics was not as important as it is now but it looked promising. So I went to the European Bioinformatics Institute, in Cambridge, to do a post-doctorate. It was a radical change; then I didn’t know how to programme, did not know anything about data analysis... As I knew practically nothing I learned a lot: programming, statistics, data analysis, about genomes. I liked it. So, to get the Ramón y Cajal scholarship and form a group here, I put forward a project on bioinformatics. And here we are.

And why did you choose cancer?

I didn’t delve into cancer until I started my group. It is a subject that interests me a lot and in which a great deal remains to be discovered. When I started researching it there were lots of data, but now there are even more. With the improvement of sequencing techniques there has been an explosion of data. Tumour genomes contain the answers to many questions.

Which questions do you want your research group to answer?

We are now trying to find out what factors affect the processes that cause carcinogenic mutations. The data are there, we develop algorithms and bioinformatic programs to explore them and find the answer.

When you are looking for carcinogenic mutations, you look at the genomes of many different people. How do you distinguish the mutations that each person has from those mutations that are common for each tumour type?

All of our body’s cells come from an original cell that divided to give rise to a whole organism. When they are adult, cells continue dividing to regenerate tissues, and each of these divisions implies a rate of error. Some mutations occur naturally and others are aggravated by environmental factors: UV rays, tobacco smoke, diet... The cells accumulate mutations and some of these mutations can cause the cell to divide ceaselessly: a tumour appears. When we sequence a tumour we find all the mutations that have occurred throughout the history of these cells. We can find hundreds of thousands! Most of these mutations, however, do not cause tumours, we believe that these are few, the so-called driver mutations. When we sequence the genome of a tumour, we also sequence the healthy cell genome of the same person. First we compare the two genomes, to detect the mutations of the tumour and focus on them, and then, with the comparison with the mutations of other tumours, we identify the driver mutations.

Where is research into cancer heading?

Despite sharing some characteristics, when we speak of cancer we are speaking about many different diseases. Every type of cancer is different and the molecular causes vary, so there cannot be one single cure for cancer. Personalized medicine looks for the cause of the patient’s tumour and tries to apply a targeted treatment. As there is very large heterogeneity in the causes of each tumour, we surely need different treatments depending on which are these causes. We’ll never have just the one single cure for cancer. What we will manage to achieve is a set of treatments classified by type of cancer.

And how do we classify tumours?

They are often classified according to the tissue of origin. This is a useful classification, but there are others. We look at the mutations that give rise to cancer and make a complementary classification. Many targeted therapies do not depend so much on the tissue in which the tumour is found but the types of mutations that cause it. It is a classification that in some cases allows us to define the most appropriate therapy for the patient.

According to your latest discovery, published in Nature, many mutations accumulate in regions of the genome where proteins necessary to carry out other functions bind. That is to say, that the cause of the accumulation of mutations is a natural function of the cell. Is this a positive finding or does it make us feel like throwing in the towel with cancer?

It is positive that we have been able to see that mutations accumulated in these sites and understand why. We now know something that we didn’t know before. The fact in itself is neither positive nor negative. Mutations happen, they are a part of what we are. For me cancer is very interesting.

Cancer is interesting?

Of course the clinical consequences are not interesting, but it helps us to understand many things about how cells work. All scientists have the goal of trying to ensure that what we do will prove useful some day. But it is mainly curiosity that moves us. Basic science must be like that, you can’t seek utility in the short term. You have to try to answer questions that are simply interesting for you. Sooner or later, the answers will be useful. But if we did research thinking only about its usefulness, we wouldn’t know a lot of things we know now. There is cancer research that is very interesting and all this research one day will lead to advances in therapy. But often, research does not have a clear aim, we simply want to understand things.

What advice would you give to young researchers?

To enjoy the job. If they enjoy it, to continue. When they cease to do so, to look for something else. It is a job that you do only if you like a lot. If not, it is hard work.