Women present a specific profile in many areas of ageing, including frailty, chronic diseases (examples are clearly musculoskeletal diseases, cardiovascular diseases, certain forms of cancer, cognitive impairment or depression), social interaction, and quality of life.
Our activity has focused on the female determinants of osteoporosis and cardiovascular diseases, quality of life after menopause, cognitive impairment and, more recently, frailty. More recently, we have also been doing research on endometriosis, a disease that causes morbidity and affects quality of life, and whose impact on healthy ageing is just beginning to be understood.
We have carried out basic and applied research work, and are therefore an example of a multidisciplinary group with interaction between basic and clinical researchers and with a profile of publications and funded projects that meet this criterion.
This research group is made up of people from different disciplines or areas of knowledge such as speech therapy, psychology, linguistics, dentistry and neurology, who carry out their professional work in different countries such as Chile, Portugal, France and, of course, Spain, more specifically in Valencia. All these professionals have in common the study and multi-disciplinary research in the field of speech therapy, more specifically in the following areas: disorders of vision and resonance, speech disorders of central aetiology, speech disorders of organic origin and orofacial motility.
The group focuses its efforts on unravelling the pathophysiological mechanisms of rare diseases, mainly progeroid processes and neuromuscular diseases. This research helps to understand the process of organic ageing.
We have provided a new animal model of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and contributed to a better understanding of the relationship between oxidative stress and gene regulation mechanisms modulated by epigenetic factors. Down's syndrome, the disease that most frequently develops mental deficiency, has also been approached from the perspective of changes in cell turnover processes, contributing to elucidating its pathophysiology. In Lafora disease, which has a poor prognosis, we have described the presence of oxidative stress and the lack of antioxidant defence.
Infertility, or the inability to conceive a child, is a medical condition recognised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that causes serious health problems for the women affected, as well as significant epidemiological and sociological repercussions for society. It is estimated that this pathology affects 15% of couples worldwide, and its incidence is on the rise.
The aim of our activity is to promote and initiate new lines of research that allow us to advance in the knowledge of reproductive medicine, improving assisted reproduction treatments, increasing their success rates and establishing new techniques for the preservation of male fertility.
The Molecular Oncology group is strongly involved in translational research in cancer with special interest in the search for biomarkers related to angiogenesis, immunoregulation and tumour stem cells in cancer, characterised by its multidisciplinary nature. The team includes researchers with expertise in different areas such as: molecular and cell biologists, clinical oncologists, thoracic surgeons, pulmonologists, pathologists and immunologists.
The group's research activity is linked to the General University Hospital of Valencia, a tertiary reference hospital in Valencia, and is closely associated with the activity of three important specialised departments: Medical Oncology (about 648,000 inhabitants), Thoracic Surgery (760,000 inhabitants) and Functional Breast Unit (648,000 inhabitants). They are also very active in recruiting patients for clinical trials.
The main lines of translational research of the group are:
1) Molecular markers in lung, colorectal, melanoma and breast cancer, mainly focused on early diagnosis and the search for prognostic and predictive factors of response to treatment through different omics approaches (genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics).
2) Liquid biopsy: for the analysis of markers in minimally invasive samples.
3) Angiogenesis and immunoregulation. Study possible interrelationships between tumour neovascularisation, the presence of immunoregulatory cell populations (Tregs cells, myelosuppressive cells, dendritic cells) and tumour recurrence or progression.
4) Tumour stem cells (CSC): characterisation and isolation of CSCs from lung cancer patient samples. Development of in vitro and in vivo models for the design of new therapeutic strategies for CSC population control.
The group has a double mission: on the one hand, to contribute to research into the Rare Respiratory Diseases-RRD area in order to improve diagnosis, prognosis and access to new therapies in the RRD treatment, as well as contributing to a higher care quality for patients with these pathologies.
On the other hand, the group's mission is to raise social awareness of RRD through the scientific spreading of biomedical advances and socio-health policies aimed at improving the patients' quality of life in all its aspects. Therefore, the group's raison d'être is to generate as much knowledge as possible about the rare respiratory diseases that are a priority for the group, with the ultimate aim of helping to improve the RRD patients' quality of life.
The group is focused on studying molecular and cellular bases of RRD in depth, which will contribute to boost knowledge of the physiopathological mechanisms of these diseases. This approach will open up a field of possibilities for defining molecular targets that will be the basis for their subsequent translation into new methods of RRD diagnosis, prognosis and treatment.
Likewise, as part of the group's mission, and being aware of the importance of both patients and their families are well informed, the members are committed to collaborating, organising and spreading the characteristics and possible biomedical advances related to RRD.
The RRD research group is led by Dr Amparo Escribano, and is made up of 5 regular members: 1 Doctor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, 2 specialists in Paediatric Pneumology (1 Doctor of Paediatric Pneumology and 1 pre-doctoral fellow), 2 graduates in Biology, who are doing the Doctoral Programme with excellence mention in Physiology at the Faculty of Medicine of the UV, and a journalist.
Since 2011, the laboratory has a training welcome programme to select future members of the group. Over the next 5 years, it is expected to increase its size and modify its composition thanks to the training of three postdoctoral researchers and the incorporation of three pre-doctoral fellows.
The group is characterised by its extensive experience in basic research and RRD clinical management. It is in fact one of the few groups with these characteristics within the UV.
The members of the research group have experience in handling different techniques for biomolecular studies that not all researchers at UV may be familiar with (cell immortalization, gene therapy, etc.)
However, the greatest strength of the group is the synergy obtained from its multidisciplinary nature: on the one hand, the main researcher (Dr Escribano) brings to the group a great deal of clinical medical knowledge of respiratory pathologies, and she is renowned for her work in paediatric pneumology. On the other hand, the group's researcher (Dr Dasí) has extensive technical experience and training in basic sciences, which are essential for managing the laboratory and implementing techniques, protocols, etc. Likewise, the IP has proved to be competent to develop projects and research hypotheses, which has led to place the group above the average quality in scientific publications produced at the UV.
As for the pre-doctoral members of the group, most of them are starting their doctoral training. It is therefore a young and motivated team with a great capacity for learning and a commitment to continuity in the short and medium term. The characteristics provided by the group members are essential to guarantee the success of the objectives set by the group in a minimum period of three years.
Infertility or the inability to conceive a child is a medical condition recognised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that causes severe health problems to affected women as well as serious epidemiological and sociological repercussions to society. The calculations show that it's a pathology affecting 15% of all worldwide couples and its incidence rate keeps increasing; it affects 10% of couples wishing to have their first baby and 10 to 25% of those wanting to have a second one. Articles 25 and 26 of the European Parliament's report on Europe's demographic future (2007/2156 (INI)) highlight the necessity to consider infertility a sensitive and important matter.
The goal of our activity is to promote and start new research lines allowing to make progress in the field of reproductive medicine by improving assisted reproductive treatments, decreasing its adverse effects and establishing new techniques for diagnosis and fertility preservation.
The group's multidisciplinary research ranges from quantitative and radiological anatomy, together with medical imaging techniques applied to the identification of the anatomical bases of the pathology, to geometric morphometry. In terms of the anatomical bases of pathology, we specialise in the study of vertebral anatomical variants and their association with clinical symptoms (pain, neuropathies, dizziness, etc.) in both modern sapiens and extinct human species (Homo Neanderthalensis). Geometric morphometry has been used to investigate hominin craniofacial biology (morphological integration), with a special interest in the cranial base as an interface between the brain and the facial skeleton. A "systems model" of human evolutionary anatomy has been developed, which conceptually employs an organism-based perspective on craniofacial and postcranial variation in hominins.
The group has also focused in recent years on the form, function and integration of the respiratory apparatus, which is an anatomical system connecting the skull and postcranium, of the human organism, as well as on the relationship between thoracic form in osteogenesis imperfecta and respiratory function, and on variations in form and their association with pain at both the cervical and lumbar levels.
The group is also investigating the development of the trunk at the evolutionary level in both extinct hominins and modern sapiens. Members of the group are also specialising in the study of geometric shape and anatomical variants in fossil records of Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Naledi and Australopithecus Sediba.
