We have been awarded a Newton Advanced Fellowship!

Today we were notified that Daniela has been named a Newton Advanced Fellow by the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society of the UK! This Fellowship has been awarded to investigate the genetic susceptibility to acral lentiginous melanoma through population studies and the use of statistical genomics methodologies. Our partner in this project is Prof. Tim Bishop, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Director of the Leeds Institute of Cancer and Pathology. We are very excited as this project will allow students in the lab to undertake training in statistics and genetic epidemiology while exploring the genetics of acral lentiginous melanoma.

We are very thankful to the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Newton Fund, and the Royal Society for supporting us, our research and our international collaborations!


The MRC has funded our team research proposal!

We are thrilled to announce we’ve been awarded a grant, part of the Cancer Research and Global Health Initiative of the Medical Research Council (UK), to study potential drug targets of acral lentiginous melanoma (ALM) in Latin American patients. This proposal is also co-led by Dr David Adams (Sanger Institute, UK) and Dr Patricia Possik (Brazilian National Cancer Institute [INCA], Brazil), with the support of Prof Meenhard Herlyn (Wistar Institute, USA) and Dr. Hector Martinez-Said (Mexican National Cancer Institute, Mexico). This award will fund our research into animal models and potential drug targets of ALM for the next two years, and will officially start our collaborations with INCA. We’re very thankful to the MRC for this funding, and can’t wait to get to work!


This month’s news at the CG&Bio lab

This month has been pretty active in the CG&Bio lab! We have presented two talks at the XXIII International Congress of Dermoscopy in Mexico City, The National Council of Science and Technology profiled us and our work in their News [in Spanish], and one of our projects was selected for an oral presentation at the 15th International Congress for the Society for Melanoma Research to take place in Manchester, England next month!

Also, we will be teaching bioinformatics methods at the Next Generation Sequencing Bioinformatics course, from Wellcome Genome Campus, in Chile January 2019! So if you are based in Latin America and the Caribbean and would like to learn more, please apply here! Bursaries available.


We’ve been awarded a UC MEXUS – CONACYT Collaborative Grant Award!

This award, given by the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS) and the National Council for Research and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT) is intended to help establish long-lasting collaborations between scientists based in University of California campuses and in Mexican institutions.

In this spirit, we are thrilled to be starting a formal collaboration with Prof. Ludmil Alexandrov, of the University of California, San Diego – widely recognised as the founder of the field of mutational signatures in cancer. This Award will allow PhD students from both groups to undertake reciprocal research internships to train in different specialised bioinformatic techniques (UCSD lab: Mutational signature analysis, UNAM lab: causal germline variant prioritisation), project planning meetings, as well as providing funds for expanding our institutional computer cluster and for performing bench experiments for hypothesis testing.

Kudos to Caro Castañeda, the PhD student in our lab who will be leading this collaboration from our side! Loads of exciting science to come 🙂

We are deeply thankful to UC MEXUS and CONACYT for this opportunity, and can’t wait to see what the results will be!


Daniela has been selected as a Forbeck Scholar Awardee!

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:
About the Scholar Award: https://www.wgfrf.org/scholar-award/
Past winners: https://www.wgfrf.org/scholars


Congratulations to Isaac Garcia, our first student to graduate!

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 but… we’ve had a good few weeks!

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.


Our Comment “Melanoma: a global perspective” is now out!

Bottle of bubbly to celebrate Raul's 1st first author publication!

Our Comment piece on the importance of studying melanoma in all populations has now been published in Nature Reviews Cancer – Click here to read it!

Congratulations to Raúl (PhD student in the lab) for this piece, hard work pays off 🙂 (Don’t forget to check out his superb global map on melanoma subtype incidence in the Supplementary Material).


News from last week: Collaboration, grant award and new appointment

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Dr. Adams talking about melanoma genetics

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:

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Happy grant day indeed!

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From left to right, Helena (bachelor student in the lab), Raúl (PhD student in the lab), Daniela and Lucía (Group leader at LIIGH)

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Happy times! From left to right, Daniela, Helena, Lucía and Mari (Group leader at LIIGH)

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!


Some more publicity for our last paper!

We are very pleased that there continues to be interest in our latest work, which is about the influence that common germline variants in the MC1R gene have on the somatic landscape of melanoma tumours.

These last days Daniela was interviewed by Nature blogs and SheKnows.com, and also wrote blog posts for the Melanoma Genetics Consortium’s MELGEN Early Training Network and the scientific magazine Genética Médica (in Spanish).

And, finally, we also made it to Men’s Health magazine! Dave was interviewed and featured in a report published this week.