Violeta Serra

Background

About Violeta Serra

After completing my PhD in the field of cellular aging and telomeres from Newcastle University, in the UK, in 2001, I joined the group of Prof. R. Schäffer (Charité, Berlin, Germany) with a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, to study cancer chemotherapy resistance. I spent two years at the CNIO (Madrid) conducting target validation subcontracted by Eli Lilly and supervised by Prof. Angel Nebreda. In 2006, I joined José Baselga's group at the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) to explore the mode of action and mechanisms of resistance to PI3K-pathway inhibitors. My work has been pivotal in defining adaptive responses to these agents in breast cancer cells. Since 2014, I lead the VHIO´s Experimental Therapeutics Group, where I continued to expand my research into the mode of action of targeted therapies for tumors harboring DNA damage repair deficiencies, as those from germline BRCA1/2-mutation carriers, and in luminal breast cancer - specifically for PARP and CDK4/6 inhibitors. To establish myself as an independent Principal Investigator, I have been awarded with two Project Grants and a Tenure Track from the Spanish Ministry of Health a Career Catalyst Research Grant from the Susan G. Komen Foundation and a Catalyst grant from the Breast Cancer Now Foundation. In 2019, I obtained two coordinated projects funded by La Marató TV3 and an ERA PerMed. I am member of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), and serve on the Editorial Board of Clinical Cancer Research. I have been reviewer for Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research, Breast Cancer Now and the for the French national cancer institute (INCa). Overall, my research is focused on the development of predictive and pharmacodynamic biomarkers for targeted agents in breast cancer