"La trajectòria embrionària de les cèl·lules mare de la sang"

Dr. Anna Bigas holds a PhD in Cell Biology from the University of Barcelona (1993). She is a Group Leader researcher at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute Barcelona (HMRIB) since 2009 and at the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute since 2020. Besides, Dr. Bigas is the Scientific Director of CIBERONC from Instituto de Salud Carlos III since 2020.  
Dr. Bigas has a long-standing interest in normal and cancer stem cell biology with a background in hematology and cancer research. She started her research on hematopoietic stem cells during her PhD and further developed her skills on experimental hematology research during her postdoctoral stage at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, USA.
Her pioneering work as a post-doc identified a role of Notch signaling in regulating hematopoietic
differentiation, which was a highly influential contribution to the field of hematopoiesis. Since starting her independent group in Spain, she has sought to decipher the molecular mechanisms that regulate stem cell commitment, maintenance, differentiation, and oncogenic transformation. Through refined genetic studies she has demonstrated crucial roles for signaling pathways and chromatin elements in the generation of hematopoietic stem cells in the mouse embryo, in the transformation of intestinal stem cells and T-ALL, as well as in therapy resistance. Her lab closely collaborates with the lab of Dr. Lluis Espinosa to uncover alternative roles for the NFkB pathway in stem cell biology and cell transformation in both systems, hematopoietic and intestinal.
As a Scientific director of CIBERONC, she has a leading role in promoting national and international collaborative and influential projects in cancer research such as Cancer Mission, Personalized medicine program projects.