Invited Speakers

María J. Vicent

Head of Polymer Therapeutics Lab. Coordinator of Advance Therapies Are. Prince Felipe Research Center (CIPF)

Group Website:

http://www.VicentResearchLab.com and http://www.cipf.es 

Researcher unique identifier(s) (ORCID): 0000-0001-7771-3373

      Dr. María J. Vicent received her Ph.D. (2001) in chemistry after her research on solid supports from the Univ.Jaume I (Castellon, Spain) after several scientific stays in Prof. Fréchet’s lab. at the University California (Berkeley, USA). María then moved into more biomedically-oriented research, initially with the Spanish company Instituto Biomar, and subsequently at the Centre for Polymer Therapeutics at the Univ.Cardiff (Wales, UK) with Prof. R. Duncan after receiving a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2002. In 2004, María joined CIPF (Valencia, Spain) as a research associate through a Marie Curie Reintegration contract and was promoted to her current position as the head of the Polymer Therapeutics Lab. in 2006. María is currently responsible for the Screening Platform and coordinates the Advanced Therapies Program at the CIPF. Furthermore, she has been the coordinator of the Valencian Community Strategy on Innovative Medicines with the lab. becoming one of the Specialist Sites in the ERIC-EU-OPENSCREEN.

María’s research group focuses on the development of novel nanopharmaceuticals for different therapeutic and diagnostic applications - in particular the application of Polymer Therapeutics in unmet clinical needs. María has supervised ten Ph.D. students, with ten more ongoing, with many funded through various competitive grants. Her group is funded by both national and EU grants (i.e. ERC Consolidator grant-MyNano, ERC-PoC-Polymmune, Fund Health La Caixa-NanoPanTher). María has received several prizes, including the IVth and the IXth Idea Awards, and she has been elected as member of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows Class of 2019. María has co-authored >110 peer-reviewed papers (h index: 37; >5000 citations) and 10 patents, 3 already licensed to industry and a fourth used as the foundation of the spin-off company ‘Polypeptide Therapeutic Solutions S.L. (PTS)’ (Valencia, Spain) in 2012. María was the President of the Spanish-Portuguese Chapter of the Controlled Release Society (SPLC-CRS) and the chairperson in key conferences in the nanomedicine field, such as the Int. Symp. on Polymer Therapeutics: From Lab. to Clinical Practice (Valencia, Spain) and the annual CRS meeting in 2019. María is also the executive editor of Adv. Drug Deliv Rev, the associate editor of NanoMedicine: NBM and DDTR, and a member of the editorial boards of key journal in the field including, J. Control Rel., Polymer Chemistry, Biomaterial Sciences, and Mol. Pharmaceutics.

Representative Publications

[1] J.J. Arroyo-Crespo et al. Characterization of Triple-Negative Breast Cancer Preclinical Models Provides Functional Evidence of Metastatic Progression. Int. J. Cancer 2019, 145(8), 2267-2281.

[2]     J.J. Arroyo-Crespo et al. Tumor Microenvironment-Targeted poly-L-glutamic acid-based Combination Conjugate for Enhanced Triple Negative Breast Cancer Treatment. Biomaterials 2018, 186, 8-21

[3] A. Duro-Castaño et al. In Vivo Imaging of MMP-13 Activity Using A Specific Polymer-FRET Peptide Conjugate Detects Early Osteoarthritis And Inhibitor Efficacy. Adv. Funct. Mat. 2018, 28, p1802738

[4] J.J. Arroyo-Crespo et al. Anticancer Activity Driven by Drug Linker Modification in a Polyglutamic Acid-based Combination-drug Conjugate. Adv. Funct. Mat. 2018, 28(22): p. 1800931.

[5] A. Armiñán, et al. (2018) Metabolomics facilitates the discrimination of the specific anti-cancer effects of free- and polymer-conjugated doxorubicin in breast cancer models. Biomaterials 162, 144.

[6]  A. Duro-Castaño, et al. (2017) Capturing Extraordinary Soft-Assembled Charge-Like Polypeptides as a Strategy for Nanocarrier Design. Adv. Mat., 2017, 29(39): p. 1702888-n/a. Cover Page.