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From the left: Maria A. Blasco, CNIO’s scientific director, Susana Codina, Fundación Occident’s deputy director, Yardena Samuels, visiting researcher, and Marisol Soengas head of the CNIO Melanoma Group. Credit: Laura M. Lombardía / CNIO.
Yardena Samuels heads the Melanoma Immunogenetics Laboratory at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot (Israel)
She will collaborate with the CNIO Melanoma Group led by Marisol Soengas, to investigate the resistance of melanoma to immunotherapy and to futher research metastasis in this type of cancer
Samuels' work focuses on the interplay between tumor mutations and the immune system
Israeli researcher Yardena Samuels is the newest recipient of Fundación Occident’s Visiting Scientist Program. She will be working with the CNIO Melanoma Group, headed by Marisol Soengas, over the next months.
Samuels heads the Melanoma Immunogenetics Laboratory at the Weizmann Institute (Rehovot, Israel). Her work focuses on identifying genetic mutations in cancer and studying how they affect the interaction between the tumor and the immune system. In recent years she has focused on applying these studies to melanoma, which she has been genetically and functionally characterizing for the last almost 20 years.
During her collaboration with the CNIO, she will develop the project ‘Heterogeneity of melanoma metastasis and resistance to immune checkpoint inhibition’. Immune checkpoint inhibition is a type of cancer immunotherapy aimed at restoring the defensive function of the patient’s immune system, which tumors have been able to neutralize. The aim of the project is to increase the efficiency of this therapy for the treatment of melanoma. Also to study the variety of cells that can exist in a melanoma metastasis, since one of Samuels’ main achievements was to discover that the heterogeneity of a tumor can be one determining factor in whether or not it responds to immunotherapy.
Fundación Occident and CNIO
The Fundación Occident Visiting Researcher program finances the stay at the CNIO for a researcher who has carried out his/her work at a prestigious international center in the last five years. These visits consolidate the links between the host research group and the visiting researcher’s center, and allow the initiation of new lines of work thanks to the exchange of ideas and common interests.
The collaboration between the Fundación Occident and the CNIO dates back to 2009. The program has made it possible for the CNIO to receive visits from David Goldgar; Rama Khokha; Mercedes Rincón; Astrid Laegreid; Maria Sibilia; Robert Benezra; Peter Petzelbauer; André Nussenzweig; Stephan A. Hahn; Patrick Sung; Chaitanya R. Divgi; Marcin Nowotny; Madalena Tarsounas; Raúl Rabadán; Wolfgang Weninger; Scott Lowe; Sonia Laín; Eva Nogales and Gonçalo Bernardes.
Yardena Samuels’s bio
With a BSc from Cambridge University (UK, 1993), and a MSc and a Ph. D in Immunology, she joined Bert Vogelstein’s laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (USA) and founded her first laboratory at the National Institutes of Health, also in the USA. That laboratory was part of the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) working group that published the genomic classification of cutaneous melanoma.
In 2012 she returned to Israel hired by the Weizmann Institute, where she has moved into the immune-genomics field.Last June she was elected President of the European Association for Cancer Research (EACR).
About CNIO
The CNIO is a Spanish public institution dedicated to cancer research, diagnosis and treatment, attached to the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (Ministry of Science and Innovation). Ranked among the top 10 monographic cancer research centers in the world (Scimago report; Nature Index), the CNIO covers the entire R&D&I pathway, from basic to clinical research, in order to transfer the results quickly and efficiently to the National Health System and the pharmaceutical and biotechnology market. It has been accredited as a Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence since the creation of this program in 2011.
About Fundación Occident
Since 1998, Fundació Occident -until 2024 called Fundació Jesús Serra- is a private non-profit organization belonging to the insurance group GCO (Grupo Catalana Occidente) created in memory of its founder Jesús Serra Santamans, renowned businessman and patron of the arts. The foundation has five lines of activities that articulate the action of the entity: Research, Business and Teaching, Social Action, Sports and Promotion of the Arts. Within the research line, its work focuses on channeling the patronage work that the Group has been carrying out for more than a century, promoting its own research awards that recognize the research career of young Spanish scientists in the fields of food and nutrition.
In addition, it promotes programs that bring the knowledge of international scientific experts to Spanish research groups and other collaborations in favor of scientific advances in cardiovascular and oncology research.