Josep Villanueva's Biography

Josep Villanueva, Group Leader, Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology

Josep Villanueva obtained his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in the year 2000. In 2002 he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship to join the laboratory of Paul Tempst at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), New York (USA). He became the lead scientist in the development of a unique automated platform for the measurement of peptides in serum using magnetic beads and a mass spectrometry read-out. He collaborated with clinicians and clinical chemists at MSKCC to effectively demonstrate that a limited subset of serum peptides provides accurate class discrimination between patients with three types of solid tumors and healthy controls. Sequence analysis revealed that these peptides were generated by ‘cancer-type’-specific exopeptidase activities. In 2006 he was promoted as Senior Staff Scientist at MSKCC. Focused on on becoming an Independent Investigator, he developed a new methodology for the high-throughput proteomics profiling of cell-secreted inventories (the ‘secretome’) with a clear emphasis on biomarkers. In 2009, he returned to Barcelona as an independent researcher and became leader of the VHIO Tumor Biomarkers Group. His research program is aimed at the discovery of new tumor-specific biomarkers and therapeutic targets using proteomic methodologies to improve cancer diagnostics and therapeutic treatment.