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IBEC Research Nuria Montserrat (Photo: IBEC).
IBEC Research Nuria Montserrat (Photo: IBEC).
 01.12.2020

IBEC researcher Nuria Montserrat joins EMBO through the Young Investigator Programme

The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) announced today the names of the 30 researchers who will join the prestigious organization as a “Young Investigators”. Nuria Montserrat, ICREA Research Professor and leader of the Pluripotency for organ regeneration group at IBEC in the Barcelona Science Park, has been elected, among other 216 candidates, as an EMBO member.

Nuria Montserrat becomes EMBO member through the Young Investigator Programme and will join of two other group leaders at IBEC who are members of EMBO: Xavier Trepat, who is member since 2018, and Pere Roca-Cusachs who was accepted in 2016 in the EMBO Young Investigator Programme and became full member in 2020.

The new EMBO Young Investigators will receive financial and practical support for a period of four years, starting in January 2021 and they will benefit from a variety of networking opportunities, mentoring by EMBO Members, training in research leadership and management and access to core facilities of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany.

Nuria Montserrat, Cutting-edge research in organoids 

While at the Center of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona (CMRB), Dr. Montserrat was part of a team including researchers from Barcelona’s Hospital Clinic and led by Dr. Juan Carlos Izpisua from the Salk Institute in California who announced the first-ever creation of chimeric 3D “mini-kidneys” from human pluripotent stem cells in 2013.

In 2014, Dr. Montserrat was one of just eight young researchers in Catalonia who received a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, to generate fundamental knowledge and technological advances to regenerate the mammalian kidney. In 2015, Nuria Montserrat joined IBEC as a Group Leader. Within this time her work has been devoted to understand how to control human pluripotent stem cells differentiation towards the renal field which resulted in the generation of vascularized kidney organoids by 2019.

In 2020, Montserrat contribute to an important breakthrough, in collaboration with other international research centers, by using for the first time human pluripotent stem cells derived organoids to study SARS-CoV-2 infection and identify a therapeutic compound reducing viral load in the engineered microtissues.

« For further information: IBEC website [+]

 

 

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