A special seminar from the Centre for Gene Therapy & Regenerative Medicine.

Speaker: Dr Meritxell Rovira, University of Barcelona, Spain

Title of the talk: "Are pancreatic ducts anything more than pipes"

Host: Rocio Sancho

Date: Thursday 16 January 2025

Time: 16.00

Where: Seminar Room 2, 28th Floor, Tower Wing, Guy’s Hospital

Dr. Rovira dedicated her career to the study of the pancreas and she acquired a broad knowledge of this gland from every perspective (endocrine and exocrine). In addition, through her career she has embraced a broad array of experimental platforms in pursuing her work, using ES cells during her PhD (IMIM, Barcelona, Spain), mouse and zebrafish models, human/mouse derived organoids and epigenetics in her postdoctoral work (Johns Hopkins Hospital-School of Medicne (USA) and IDIBAPS (Barcelona, Spain). Therefore, acquiring a unique ability to pursue questions that are not necessarily addressable in any single experimental system. She established her research group in September 2019, after being awarded a prestigious Ramon y Cajal excellence contract, consolidating her as an independent group leader at University of Barcelona-IDIBELL. Dr. Rovira has recently become an associate professor at University of Barcelona-IDIBELL. Rovira’s group (currently including two postdocs, three PhD students, one Bioinformatician and one technician) research interest is focused on better understanding of pancreas development, pancreatic regeneration and cell of origin of pancreatic cancer and ampullary tumours. Moreover, the lab has expertise in state-of-the-art techniques such as scRNAseq, multiomics and complex organoids, as well as GEMM models of pancreatic cancer and access to human samples from healthy donors and PDAC patients through established collaborations with surgeons and oncologist at Bellvitge Hospital and ICO.