Duvi | Vigo
Scientific excellence is the criterion that determines the award of Starting Grants, the prestigious scholarships of the European Research Council (ERC) to facilitate the development of their own independent projects by young researchers. Projects such as the study of transmissible cancer in marine animals by researcher from the Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Immunology José Tubío, to whom the ERC has just awarded 1.5 million euros for the development of this research over the next five years. “For me it is like receiving an Olympic medal, because the competition is enormous, this year around 3000 projects were submitted, most of them of extraordinary quality, and around 300 will be funded”, says Tubío. The researcher, who joined the University of Vigo this year through a Ramón y Cajal contract after a four-year period in Cambridge, thus becomes the second researcher from the Vigo academic institution to be selected in this prestigious program.
A project selected from nearly 3000 applications
The ERC programme is aimed at researchers with a track record of between 2 and 7 years since the completion of their doctorate and promoted with the aim of retaining, promoting and taking advantage of the talent of the new generations and allowing them to develop their own projects. A total of 2935 projects were submitted to the 2016 Starting Grant call in the three eligible lines, Physical Sciences and Engineering, Social Sciences and Humanities and Life Sciences. In the latter, divided in turn into nine panels that brought together a total of 854 projects, the proposal with which Tubío was just selected is inserted, which identifies two of the keys to his selection. The first, having thoroughly prepared the interview prior to the final resolution, which led him to present his project, with bivalves included, to the ERC expert committee in Brussels in June, since “the call requires a competitive and original project, but also knowing how to defend it”. And the second is “to have the help of David Posada”, the first researcher from the University recognized in this European program and who currently has a Consolidator Grant. In addition to Tubío’s Starting Grant, there is also the one obtained by researcher Elena Ojea, who will join the University of Vigo next October.
For Tubío, his selection in this program “is the reward for five years of work, of practically full dedication”. The researcher was one of 85 candidates who competed in a “very competitive” panel, that of Genetics, Genomics and Bioinformatics, of which a total of 20 were selected for the interview phase prior to this final resolution, in which the ERC expert committee values the excellence of both the researcher and the project with which he competes. In this sense, his previous career as a cancer genomics researcher, which he developed during the last four years at the University of Cambridge, with more than ten articles published in Nature and Science, two of them as lead author, served as an endorsement of the candidacy presented by Tubío with the University of Vigo as the host institution. “But, logically, the icing on the cake is the project”, highlights this researcher of the novel line that will constitute his main field of work, the study of transmissible cancers in marine animals.
A very particular metastasis
Tubío explains that until a year ago, the existence of “cancers that can be transmitted from one individual to another” in marine species was unknown, a casuistry known until then only in dogs and the Tasmanian devil, two species on which the Galician researcher had focused his research in Cambridge in recent years. “In this case, it is cancers that are transmitted through the sea from one bivalve to another, so if you think about it, this mechanism is like a metastasis, only instead of being transmitted from one organ to another, it does so between different individuals.”
Therefore, delving deeper into the “mechanisms that occur in metastasis through the study of these very special cancers” and identifying “those genes that make a cell transmissible, the molecular mechanisms that make a cell able to leave one animal and go to another” constitutes the basis of this research. The 1.5 million euros awarded by the ERC will be allocated “mostly to the sequencing of the genomes of marine animals” and the hiring of research staff, to which are also added the costs of equipment and consumables both for the laboratory in which Tubío works with his team at Cacti and for what “we could call a satellite laboratory at Ecimat, without which this project could not be carried out” and which, as Tubío points out, constituted a “competitive advantage” in this selection process, since they will make it possible to obtain samples that will contribute to this being a “100% Vigo” research project, in an institution that “has a tradition of enormous work in the genomics of bivalves”.
