Past research in the last years has led to the approval of inhibitors of specific cell cycle regulators (cyclin-dependent kinases 4 and 6; CDK4/6) in breast cancer therapy. Inhibiting CDK4/6, along with hormonotherapy is the current standard of care in advanced oestrogen receptor-positive breast cancer. Yet, these inhibitors are not efficient in other tumour types and, despite the extensive analysis of the cell cycle in the last years, we still do not understand how cells drive the cell cycle in the absence of CDK4/6 activity.

Our lab has contributed to several aspects of the understanding of the control of cell cycle control using a variety of biochemical and genetic tools. We are now very interested in applying this expertise to the real-world scenario of patients in the urgent need of efficacious therapies. Recent efforts in our lab focus on the identification of new cancer targets, understanding mechanisms of resistance to current drugs, and validation of new therapeutic strategies. We are also interested in the alterations that cell cycle deregulation imposes in tumour cells and therapeutic possibilities that could discriminate between tumour and normal cells. We are interested in novel therapeutic opportunities in genomically unstable tumours, as well as generating a platform of patient-derived samples in which genetics, biochemistry and single-cell studies can be combined to develop and test novel therapeutic strategies to be translated to the clinic.