The Forbeck Research Foundation was established in honour of 11-year-old Billy Forbeck, who sadly passed away from neuroblastoma in 1984. Every year, the Foundation organises a Forum to exchange ideas to further progress in the fight against cancer. The Annual Forum is held in an intimate venue where ~20 scientists and clinicians from around the world discuss unpublished work and seek opportunities for interaction – which has resulted in highly productive interdisciplinary collaborations. This year, the topic is Cancer Predisposition.

Each year the Foundation selects four young investigators from around the world as Forbeck Scholars to attend the Annual Forum in their year of election and four subsequent Scholar Retreats which offers the opportunity to set up collaborations, meet with experts from different areas of cancer research and discuss novel ideas. This year, Daniela has been selected as a Forbeck Scholar and will attend the Annual Forum in Lake Geneva, WI in November.

This news is very exciting as it will offer an opportunity to discuss the lab’s work in depth with other clinicians and scientists from around the world.

About the William Guy Forbeck Research Foundation: https://www.wgfrf.org/
About the Scholar Award: https://www.wgfrf.org/scholar-award/
Past winners: https://www.wgfrf.org/scholars

Last Friday, Isaac successfully defended his B.Sc. thesis (with honours!), entitled “Functional in silico analysis of SNPs influencing melanoma development and telomere length”. In it, he deploys a series of computational analyses (including genotype imputation, linkage disequilibrium calculations, epigenome state imputation and other functional predictions) in order to prioritise candidate variants underlying increased melanoma risk and telomere length. Based on his work, we are now planning some exciting experiments to test these functional hypotheses.

Congratulations on great work, Isaac, and looking forward to seeing all your future scientific contributions!

It’s been quiet lately at the CG&Bio Lab as students work on their projects and write their theses and postdocs and PI write grants… but these past weeks we’ve been busy so here’s an update: We have presented a poster at the 9th World Melanoma Congress / Society for Melanoma Research Meeting in Brisbane, Australia, and we won a Travel Award! We’ve also had good news in terms of funding: We’ve been awarded a Research Stimulus Grant from the Miguel Alemán Trust, based in Mexico, and we’ve had our application for project funding to the National University approved for the next year. We’re very grateful to these organisations as their support will allow us to continue studying the genetic causes of melanoma.

Last week was very active for the CG&Bio lab! On Monday, we received the visit of Dr. David Adams, a very close collaborator from the Sanger Institute (and with whom Daniela did her PhD). Dr. Adams gave a talk on the genetics of melanoma and discussed with the lab the different projects we are working on together. We think the meeting was very productive, with new research ideas being discussed to keep the close relationship between our labs.

Then, on Wednesday, we received excellent news: The Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest medical research charity, has decided to fund us through a Seed Award in Science for the next two years! This means we now have funding to study cancer samples collected in Mexico and elucidate genetic causes and drivers of malignancy in our population. We are very thankful to them and super excited to start working on these projects! Colleagues and people in the lab planned a little surprise celebration as this is the first grant our young lab has got. A few pics from the celebration:

Finally, on Friday Daniela was appointed a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (National System of Researchers), Level I. A week of good news all around!

Welcome to the online home of the new Cancer Genetics lab at LIIGH UNAM!

LIIGH stands for International Laboratory for Human Genome Research (Laboratorio Internacional de Investigación sobre el Genoma Humano, in Spanish) and we are based at the National University of Mexico (UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), in its lovely Juriquilla Campus. Our lab was established only a few months ago, so we are in the process of setting everything up and getting collaborations rolling!

We are interested in investigating the genetic predisposition to cancer, in the context of the Latin American populations, especially Mexicans. At the moment, we are focused on the genetics of the malignant skin cancer melanoma but we are hoping to eventually study other cancers of relevance in this part of the world. Our expertise is in the data analysis from whole exome and whole genome sequencing and their interpretation, and we hope to perform functional studies to help translate bioinformatic findings into clinically actionable results.

Our lab is led by C. Daniela Robles-Espinoza, Ph.D. If you are interested in our work, please get in touch!