Maria Casanova-Acebes

Dr. Casanova-Acebes was recently appointed Assistant Professor at Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO) where she leads the laboratory of Cancer Immunity since January 2021.

She studied Biology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid where she received her PhD in Cellular Biology and Genetics under the supervision of Dr. Andrés Hidalgo at CNIC. Her PhD studies focused in understanding the mechanisms of neutrophil aging and clearance, and how neutrophil removal facilitates the circadian trafficking of hematopoietic progenitor into the blood (published in Cell, 2013 and Journal of Experimental Medicine 2018).

After her PhD, she joined Dr. Miriam Merad laboratory in Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York supported by the Human Frontiers Science Program.

During her postdoctoral research Dr. Casanova-Acebes studied the role of macrophage ontogeny in the context of lung adenocarcinoma (Nature 2021), breast (Nature Communications 2018) and ovarian cancer (Nature Communications 2020). Her most recent work (Nature 2021) revealed the key contribution of embryonic macrophages to tumor outcome and uncovers novel macrophage determinants of tumor immunity.

Dr. Casanova-Acebes has been awarded a Ramón y Cajal fellowship (2021) and she is the recipient of several national and international grants focused on identifying myeloid vulnerabilities in cancer.

As Junior PI at CNIO her research aims to uncover the role of myeloid cells in metastasis initiation and progression utilizing state-of-the-art technologies in combination with genetically- engineered mouse models and fresh tissue biopsies from cancer patients.