Passionate about immunology, her career has led her to decipher the mysteries of tissues, from the most basic structures to the complexity of genomes. Thanks to technological advances, she has been able to deepen the analysis of whole genomes and study markers on a scale that has never been seen before. After a stay in Berlin, she decided to return to Barcelona, where she heads the Spatial Genomics Team at the National Centre for Genomic Analysis (CNAG).

What does the study of spatial genomics involve, and how can it influence disease diagnosis? In which areas do you think this technology has the most potential?

In the field of spatial genomics, what we do is to take patient tissue samples from hospitals and study how they are organised at the molecular and cellular level. These samples can be from healthy tissues, although it’s not very common, or from biopsies or resections of a sample from a tumour or chronic disease. We want to understand how tissue organisation and architecture, at the molecular and cellular level, can explain the disease.

What is the main challenge in applying spatial genomics in a clinical setting?

At CNAG, we have two key elements for research in spatial genomics: a solid technological infrastructure and strong expertise in computational biology. This allows us to recruit computational biologists and create a rich environment for analyzing complex data. My role has been to combine these strengths, but it’s clear that we also need experts in histopathology, which is essential to understand human tissues that will later be analyzed by computational biologists—what we call digital pathology. We need to take these data matrices from tissues and make sense of them in order to move research forward. AI already plays an important role here, and it will become indispensable, especially for standardizing analysis processes and making them more robust and faster, ultimately bringing us closer to clinical applications.

How does your experience in tissue immunology contribute to the goals of spatial genomics at CNAG, and what advances do you hope to achieve in tissue characterization?

The immune system is essential for maintaining tissue homeostasis and protecting us from any external threats. This idea has guided my entire career: understanding how immune cells act within tissues, which, in turn, are the sites where immune cells carry out their functions. As technology has advanced, it has allowed us to analyse not just a few protein or RNA markers, but up to 18,000 markers — in other words, the entire genome. This technological leap has exponentially increased our capacity to characterize a sample in just a few years. Only 15 years ago, single-cell RNA sequencing didn’t even exist. Now, we can gather all the information from a single cell, know exactly where it is within the tissue, who its neighbours are, how it interacts with other cells, and which molecules are used for communication. This is the next revolution in biomedicine.

What opportunities do you see in spatial genomics for advancing personalised medicine?

There are many. When we take a sample from a patient, we obtain all their genetic, histopathological and case-specific information, which allows us, for example, to analyse a cancer. This is one of the major areas for spatial genomics’ application, as we know that the interaction between tumour cells and the tissue microenvironment determines to a large extent the patient’s prognosis, the treatment to be given and how the patient will respond. With this information, we can see how tumour cells are organised in each patient’s organ or tissue, allowing us to tailor a targeted therapy that reaches where it’s needed, or to optimise the use of immunotherapy in cancer.

Regarding the CNAG’s positioning as a benchmark in genomics research, how do you value it within the Barcelona Science Park ecosystem, and what synergies do you think it can generate with other centres and institutions?

As I have only been here for a short time, I am still building the network of collaborations, but in this time we have already established several connections in the field of spatial genomics. In just a year and a half, we have fostered numerous collaborations, especially within the Barcelona Science Park. For example, we have launched important projects with the Institute for Research in Biomedicine
(IRB Barcelona) and have applied for national and international grants for joint initiatives. These are very large projects, which have also been joined by pharmaceutical and biotech companies to try to understand how treatments for certain diseases affect tissue architecture and how we can improve them, to give just one example.

CNAG has state-of-the-art technological facilities that enable cutting-edge research. How do these facilities benefit research in your field?

I believe CNAG has been one of the pioneers in committing to a research direction that, although few recognized its potential at first, is now clearly well established. In fact, in 2021, Nature named Spatial Transcriptomics the Method of the Year, and just last December 2024, it did the same with Spatial Proteomics—both are advanced biological analysis techniques. CNAG was quick to embrace this direction. We have the necessary technology to perform these analyses—without it, nothing is possible—but we also have the research talent required to make sense of the data, which involves millions of cells per sample and entire genomes. You need experts in pathology, molecular biology, cell biology, and more to bring all of this together, break it down, and interpret it. Moreover, we are part of international consortia dedicated to creating spatial maps of tissues. Right now, we are moving forward with Spatial technology, where laboratories and institutions around the world collaborate to develop these tools, harness their full potential, and bring them into clinical practice.

How do you see the role of women in science and the importance of gender equality in research?

Progress is being made overall, but we’re still far from achieving true gender equity. There is a bias in how the same work is recognized depending on whether it’s signed by a man or a woman, and several studies have demonstrated this. There’s still a long way to go—partly because the female perspective in research is different. It brings with it cultures and ways of working that tend to be more inclusive. We need to address and solve problems not only at a purely theoretical, intellectual, or scientific level, but also in terms of team dynamics—and that has an impact. I believe it’s still a challenge to make science truly equitable, but equitable science will be better science. The more diverse perspectives we have in science, the more representative science will be of real life.

What is the CNAG’s aim for the coming years in view of this technology’s potential? 

At the CNAG we have two key elements for spatial genomics research: a solid technological infrastructure and expertise in computational biology. I think there is a clear commitment to move towards diagnostics, although it’s not easy, because
there are other centres working in this direction. However, the CNAG’s objective is still to consolidate itself as a centre of reference in genomic technology and infrastructure, not only in Catalonia, but also at national and European level. There is also an important drive to promote in-house projects within the centre as a driver of innovation, facilitating the transition to clinical applications, the creation of start-ups and the advancement of academic research.