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Pilar Baldominos, PhD from the Universitat Politècnica de València, who was inspired by Star Wars to fight cancer, has received one of the most prestigious awards given in the United States to the best doctoral theses in the field of biological sciences. The prize is the Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award, awarded annually by the Fred Hutch Cancer Center, a world leader in cancer research.

Along with Baldominos, young researchers from institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have received this award.

Pilar Baldominos has received this award for the work she conducted during her PhD studies at the UPV, which she has developed over the last 6 years at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. There, Baldominos designed a pioneering technology that she called PADMEseq, which, combined with the use of JEDI (Just eGFP Death Inducer) mice - developed by her thesis director, Dr Judith Agudo - opens a new door to cancer treatment.

'In our laboratory, cancer was the dark side, and science was the force,' recalls Baldominos, referring to the popular saga conceived by filmmaker George Lucas. By combining PADME and JEDI, they managed to mark under the microscope the regions where the cells that the immune system cannot kill are located to compare them with other tumour regions.

Their work could help select the patients who can respond better to immunotherapy and contribute to further improving current therapies. 'Understanding who the neighbours of these cells are helps us to know why the therapy fails and opens up new avenues to study how we can reverse it,' adds Baldominos.

Immunotherapy against cancer

As Pilar Baldominos explains, cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Despite enormous efforts to understand, prevent and cure this conglomeration of diseases, there is still a high mortality rate. Immunotherapy, the reinforcement of the immune system to eliminate tumour cells, was a revolutionary discovery and made it possible to treat many types of tumours that did not respond to conventional therapies.

'Our immune system is a 'living drug' with exquisite specificity and the invaluable capacity for memory. This means it will remember the enemy and attack it as soon as it returns. This way, anti-cancer immune cells will persist and patrol the body, protecting it against future tumour aggressions. During my PhD studies, I discovered a population of quiescent cancer cells (QCC) in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) that restricts immune infiltration within the tumour in both mice and patients. QCCs generate an immunosuppressive environment, with a striking reduction in T cells, constituting a reservoir of resistance during immunotherapy,' explains Pilar Baldominos.

In her work, combining PADMEseq and JEDI mice, Baldominos discovered a phenotypically distinct population of cancer cells that dictates the distribution of immune cells within a tumour mass. ‘Understanding this process is essential for identifying new strategies to increase immune infiltration in solid tumours and contribute to improving therapy,’ concludes Pilar Baldominos.

About Pilar Baldominos

Pilar Baldominos Flores was born in Alcalá de Henares in 1993 and has lived most of her life in Valencia. She graduated from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in 2015 and completed her bachelor's thesis in the haematology department of the Hospital Universitario y Politécnico La Fe. During this period, she participated in different projects, completed an Erasmus+ stay at the University of Cambridge (UK), was a member of the UPV iGEM 2015 team, and was awarded a gold medal in this competition. Subsequently, she studied for a Master's Degree in Advanced Immunology at the University of Barcelona (UB). Once completed, she joined Fyodor Kondrashov's laboratory, first at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona and later at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) in Austria.

She completed her PhD studies at the Universitat Politècnica de València in the laboratory of Judith Agudo at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, researching the escape mechanisms used by tumours to survive the immune system which may give rise to new therapeutic targets.

Currently, she continues her postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of Joan Brugge at Harvard Medical School, researching the relationship between the immune system and cancer during tumour development.