During the 2017-2018 academic year, a total of 86 PhD theses were read and their corresponding examination committees put 21 of them forward to compete for the PhD Special Awards. The awards ceremony will take place during the 2020 UPF Graduation Ceremony for master's and doctoral degree students.  

The Special Award Comittee that awarded the nine candidates was formed by Dr. Berta Alsina, Dr. Elena Bosch, Dr. Juana Díez, Dr. Fernando G. 

Benavides, Dr. Joaquim Gea,  Dr. Cristina López-Rodriguez, Dr. Mariano Sentí, Dr. Ruben Vicente, Dr. Núria Centeno and Dr. Alfonso Martínez-Arias. 

Carlota Rubio Pérez recieve this PhD Special Award for her thesis “Understanding the genomic makeup of tumors to guide personalized medicine”, directed by Dr. Abel González Pérez and Dr. Nuria López Bigas from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine. She describes one of the first pan-cancer driver integrative landscapes, expanding it with the first landscape of genomic-guided therapeutic opportunities. This first result of the thesis became the seed for two other further contributions. First, a software tool called OncoPaD, aimed to aid the design of next generation sequencing mutational cancer gene panels in a rational way. Second, another software tool called the Cancer Genome Interpreter, aimed to support the identification of biologically and therapeutically relevant variants in a patient’s tumor upon sequencing.

This thesis has been awarded the International PhD Mention.

Selected publications from the thesis:

1. Rubio-Perez C*, Tamborero D*, Schroeder MP, Antolín AA, Deu-Pons J, Perez-Llamas C, Mestres J, Gonzalez-Perez A, Lopez-Bigas, N. In silico prescription of anticancer drugs to cohorts of 28 tumor types reveals targeting opportunities. Cancer Cell, 27:382-396, 2015.

2. Rubio-Perez C, Deu-Pons J, Tamborero D, Lopez-Bigas N, Gonzalez-Perez A. Rational design of cancer gene panels with OncoPaD. Genome Medicine, 8:98, 2016.