Damia Romero-Moya,

As a Graduate student in Dr. Pablo Menendez’s lab (Barcelona, Spain) my research was focused on stem cell biology and metabolism. I optimized and set up xenotransplant models to address the more appropriate route and the experimental conditions to read out normal and leukemia hematopoiesis in immunodeficient mice. In parallel, I studied the contribution of mitochondrial function and mass to the in vitro homeostasis and in vivo repopulating function of cord blood­-derived hematopoietic stem cells.
I generated and fully characterized "bona fide" iPSCs from patients carrying a COQ4 mutation. I successfully corrected a point mutation in the iPSCs using CRISPR/Cas9 technology, the isogenic iPSCs were studied metabolically and functionally towards differentiation into skeletal muscle, dopaminergic neurons and motor neurons. We described a novel iPSC disease model for the rare disease (Coenzyme Q10 deficiency) where the correction of the mutations resume the metabolic defect in muscle and iPSCs.
Hematopoietic malignancies such as pedriatic leukemia were a high research topic at Menendez’s lab. I used NSG mice model to xenograft human cells (leukemic blast, leukemic cell lines and HSC) to mainly elucidate how the epigenetic modification of MLL rearrangement affect blood cells.

As a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Jeroen Roose’s lab I have characterized the RoLoRiG mice; overexpression of RasGRP1 results in impaired expansion of cells from the T, B, and myeloid lineages on blood, spleen and BM, whereas KRASG12D expression results in expansion of myeloid cells (myeloproliferative disease) with a T­-ALL in the background. I also performed large synthetic lethal screens to discover new targets that – when combined with GDC0941 – are cytotoxic.