Javier León was Graduated in Biological Sciences and Graduated in Pharmacy in the University Complutense, Madrid. He also holds the title of Specialist in Microbiology (FIR, Hospital Marqués de Valdecilla, Santander). He defended in 1983 the PhD Thesis on antibiotic resistance in the University of Cantabria (UC), and did a postdoctoral research (1984- 1986) in New York University Cancer Center. In 1986 he got the position of “Profesor Titular” of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the UC and in 1994 that of “Catedrático”. Since 1988 J. León leads a research group and in 2007 he moved to the Instituto de Biomedicina y Biotecnología (IBBTEC), a joint center CSIC-UC.
Research activity
Dr. León’s group has been funded by the Plan Estatal de I+D, being the PI in 10 consecutive grants, and of a few local grants. He has spent as visiting scientist a total of 2.5 years in Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (Seattle) and Dana Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Cancer Center (Boston).
He has supervised 21 PhD Thesis and published 94 research papers in indexed journals, being first or corresponding author in 62 of them. His H-index is 36 (Google Scholar) or 33 (Scopus) with more than 3450 citations (Scopus). Since 2010 he has published 24 research papers. He has six research “sexenios” (last 2013-18)
His research interests over the last 20 years have been:
a) MYC oncogene in cell cycle and the mechanisms by which MYC accelerates the cell cycle and produces the inhibition of p53 and p27 activities (Ceballos et al. 2000. Ceballos et al. 2005; Acosta et al, 2008), discovery of SKP2 as a new MYC target gene (Bretones, 2015) and the mechanisms by which MYC induces cell cycle acceleration (Ferrandiz, 2009; Bretones, 2011; Garcia-Sanz, 2014; Garcia-Gutierrez, 2019)
b) Translational research in oncohemathology: roles of MYC oncogene and p27 in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (Caraballo et al., 2014) and in chronic myeloid leukemia (Albajar, 2011; Gomez-Casares,2013; García-Alegría, 2016)
c) Currently, his research interests focus on the roles of MYC network genes MXD1 (Lafita-Navarro, 2016) and MNT, the most relevant members MXD superfamily of transcriptional regulators (Lafita-Navarro, 2016; Lafita-Navarro 2019) and finding new interactions of MNT that may explain some of its biological functions (Liaño-Pons, 2020; Cancers 2020).
Teaching Activity and Transference
J. León teaches in the courses of “Biochemistry” and “Molecular Biology” of Medicine Degree and a course on “Molecular Bases of Cell Proliferation” in the Master of Molecular Biology and Biomedicine. He has co-authored a textbook, “Manual de Genética Molecular” (Ed. Sintesis, 1994). He has filed three patents
Administrative and evaluation activities
J. León has served as Head of the Department of Molecular Biology, Director of the IBBTEC and Vice-chancellor for Research. He has served in 7 projects evaluation panels of Plan Estatal I+D, and of international agencies (UK, Australia,
