Mariano Barbacid

Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO), (Spanish National Cancer Research Centre), Madrid, Spain

Mariano Barbacid Picture Mariano Barbacid is Director of the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO) in Madrid. He received his PhD in Biochemistry from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid in 1974. From 1974 to 1978 he trained as a postdoctoral fellow in retroviral oncogenes in the group of Stuart A. Aaronson at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1978 he started his own group to work on the molecular biology of human tumours. His work led to the isolation of the first human oncogene in the spring of 1982. Subsequently, he demonstrated that this oncogene was a mutant allele of the H-Ras proto-oncogene and owed its oncogenic properties to a single somatic mutation in its coding sequences. This work, also carried out independently in the groups of Robert Weinberg (MIT) and Michael Wigler (CSHL), helped to establish the molecular bases of human cancer.

Other contributions of special scientific relevance include the identification of Ras oncogenes as targets of chemical carcinogens (1984-85) and the discovery of the Trk family of tyrosine protein kinase receptors (1985-88) and the subsequent demonstration that they are the signalling receptors for the NGF family of neurotrophic factors (1991).

In 1984, Mariano Barbacid moved to Frederick Maryland as Head of the Developmental Oncology Section, and in 1988 he joined the Bristol Myers-Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey where he became Vice President, Oncology Drug Discovery in 1995. In 1998, he returned to his native Madrid to create the CNIO that currently houses 450 investigators allocated in twenty five research groups (see Commentary in Cell, 129: 641-644, 2007). Since his return to Spain, Mariano Barbacid is concentrating on the study of the role of cell cycle regulators in vivo and on the design of new animal models of cancer using gene-targeting technologies.

The relevance of Mariano Barbacid’s work has been recognised by several awards, including the Young Investigator Award of the American Association of Cancer Research (USA, 1986), the Steiner Prize (Switzerland, 1988), the Ipsen Prize in Neurobiology (France, 1994) and more recently the Brupbaher Cancer Research Prize (Switzerland, 2005). In addition, Mariano Barbacid has received several Spanish Awards and a Doctorate Honoris causa by the Universidad Internacional Menendez y Pelayo (1995). He has been a Member of EMBO since 1996 and has over 233 publications, including 165 original articles and 23 invited reviews in journals with impact factor (average IF of 12.04) as well as 45 book chapters and proceedings of various symposia. He has an overall Hirsch "h" factor of 84.