The Barcelona City Council acknowledges “their contribution to advancing basic knowledge of cancer by developing innovative and essential computational methods that allow mutational patterns to be deciphered from data from different types of tumour types taken from patients”.
The Barcelona City Council announced the winners of the 2021 City of Barcelona Awards this week, the highest recognition that the city gives to its residents.
In the Life Sciences category, the awardees are Dr. Núria López-Bigas, ICREA researcher and head of the Biomedical Genomics lab at the BIST centre IRB Barcelona, Dr. Ferran Muiños, a postdoctoral fellow in the same group, and Dr. Abel González-Pérez, a research associate in the same lab.
The scientists have been presented with this award for the development of a computational method, called BoostDM, which identifies cancer-causing mutations for each type of cancer. Published in the journal Nature, the work aims to accelerate cancer research and provide tools that help oncologists choose the most appropriate treatment for each patient.
The jury has recognised “their contribution to advancing basic knowledge of cancer by developing innovative and essential computational methods (…)“, while highlighting “the importance of this study for cross-sectional advancement in different basic research disciplines, such as genomics, evolutionary biology, and cell biology”.
“This work is the result of a close collaboration between five people, namely Fran Martínez-Jiménez, Oriol Pich, and the three of us. The fact that the jury has deemed our work worthy of the City of Barcelona award is wonderful and we are most excited about it,” says Dr. López-Bigas.
This is the fourth time that researchers at IRB Barcelona have received this award: Dr. Ernest Giralt (former head of the Peptides and Proteins lab and current Emeritus professor at IRB Barcelona) received the award in 2014, followed by Dr. Salvador Aznar-Benitah (head of the Stem Cells and Cancer lab) in 2016, and Dr. Eduard Batlle (head of the Colorectal Cancer lab) in 2018.
The 2021 City of Barcelona Award ceremony will take place at 18:00h on February 15, 2022 in the “Saló de Cent” in the Barcelona City Council building.
Learn more on the IRB Barcelona website.
