Raquel Buj, PhD

Research Assistant Professor

Raquel’s first contact with science was as undergraduate student working with Drosophila melanogaster genetics on the Department of Genetics of the Valencia University (Spain), where she obtained her BS in Biology in 2010. Then, in 2011, she moved to Barcelona to obtain a MS in Developmental Biology and Genetics in the University of Barcelona (Spain). Her MS project involved the development of a versatile cloning toolkit for constructing customizable fusion proteins based on Gateway cloning system. Later one, She obtained a fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and joined Miguel A. Peinado laboratory at PMPPC-IGTP (Barcelona, Spain). There she studied the DNA methylation dysregulation during thyroid cancer, developing a useful algorithm to stratify thyroid cancer patients and a tool to assess global hypomethylation in routine clinical samples. She obtained her PhD in February 2017. Her current work is focused on non-canonical roles of p16 in nucleotide metabolism and the immune microenvironment. She was funded 2018-2020 by a Penn State Cancer Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship.

In 2021, Raquel was promoted to research faculty. She was awarded a Melanoma Research Foundation Career Development Grant in 2022.

Links:

Read Raquel’s Cell Reports paper on the role of p16 loss in nucleotide metabolism here

Read the highlight of Raquel’s paper here

Read Raquel’s mini review on nucleotide metabolism in cancer and metabolic disease here

Read Raquel’s Author’s View on non-canonical roles of p16 here

Read Raquel’s paper on p16 and the SASP here

Read Raquel’s senior author review on p16 and immune surveillance here

Read Raquel’s co-first author preprint on purine metabolism as a metabolic vulnerability of p16-low cancers here

Contact Raquel: bujgomezr@upmc.edu