Joan Massagué Solé

Joan Massagué Solé ( born April 30, 1953 in Barcelona ) is a Spanish pharmacologist and cancer researcher.

Biography

Joan Massagué Solé was born in 1953 in Barcelona. He studied pharmacy and received his PhD in biochemistry in 1978 from the Universidad de Barcelona. During his tenure at Brown University ( since 1982) in Providence, Rhode Iceland, USA, he discovered the structure of the insulin receptor. Later he worked as a professor of biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts. In 1989 he became head of the Department of Cell Biology and Genetics at Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he led the program for biology and genetics of cancer since 2003. He has worked as a researcher for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Joan Massagué is deputy director of the Institut de Recerca Biomedica (IRB Barcelona), where he leads the research group Metlab in which several research projects on the cell proliferation of tumor cells and metastases are located.

Research Projects

Massagués research interest focused mainly on the mechanisms of transmission of information, which are necessary for normal tissue development and come with a cancer out of control. This is for example the case with TGF- β ( Transforming Growth Factor β ), a cytokine that plays an important role in inflammatory processes and regulates cell proliferation during embryonic development.

Importance

Massagué is one of the leading researchers in the field of regulation of cell division and metastasis of cancer, the author of more than 250 scientific papers on these topics and one of the fifty most cited scientists of all disciplines in the past 20 years ( and among the five most frequently cited biochemists ). His research results are crucial for deciphering the mechanisms that stop cell division, ie the process that when he gets out of control, leads to tumor formation. His work has allowed the identification of genes that control the metastatic spread of tumor cells to other organs in breast cancer, a discovery that opens new research perspectives.

Massagué is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Organization and the Spanish Royal Academies of Medicine and Pharmacy ( Reales de Medicina y Farmacia Academias Españolas ). He has received numerous awards, including the Keith R. Porter Lecture in 2000, the Premio Fundación BBVA Fronteras del Conocimiento of Biomedicine 2008, the Prince of Asturias Award in the category of science and technology in 2004, the Premio Nacional de Investigación Rey Don Juan Carlos I and the Howard Taylor Ricketts Award. Solé 2012 was awarded the Pasarow Award for Cancer Research.

Writings (selection )

• Joan Massagué Solé: Regulació hormonally del metabolisme Hepatic del glicògen: efectes del glucagó, l' epinefrina i la insulina. Dissertation, University of Barcelona, 1978
• Joan Massagué Solé, James M. Roberts, Rik Derynck, Erwin F. Wagner: Cell multiplication. Current Biology Ltd. , 1995
• Joan Massagué Solé: Mechanisms of cytostasis and metastasis. In: Anal de la Real Academia Nacional de Medicina ( Madr ). Volume 121, No. 4, 2004, pp. 559-571, PMID 15997585 ( digitized, PDF, 7.1 MB)
• Joan Massagué Solé: Actes d' urbanity i Terrorism cellular de la citostasis a la metastasis. Publisher Reial Academia de Farmacia de Catalunya, 2006