She was awarded with a VENI grant (NWO; “Transcriptome-wise dendritic cell manipulation”) and joined Sanquin Research (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) in 2010 as a junior Group Leader at the Dept. of Blood Cell Research (Head Prof. T.K. van den Berg), where she focused in megakaryopoiesis and platelets. She returned to Spain with a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship, and after 2 years at the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria San Carlos (IdISSC, Madrid, Spain), she continues her research since January 2018 at the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria del Principado de Asturias (ISPA), appointed by the University of Oviedo, Department of Medicine (Spain).
The Platelet Research Lab studies megakaryocytic differentiation and platelet production and function in health and disease. We are interested on unravelling how different health-stress or pathological conditions affect megakaryopoiesis and platelets. In particular, we focus on cellular differentiation and in transcription and translation regulation during megakaryopoiesis. The main question we would like to answer is how these processes may be disturbed in hematological and non-hematological pathologies, with the concomitant repercussion in platelet production and/or function. We have a multidisciplinary study approach, and therefore we have established collaborations with other clinical areas such as hematology, psychiatry, endocrinology, ophthalmology and cardiovascular medicine, with whom we intend to study megakaryopoiesis and platelets in various pathologies, hematological and non-hematological. Understanding how megakaryocytic differentiation is regulated in health and disease, and the characteristics of the platelet produce, will help developing platelet-based novel and personalized therapies, and may lead to the use of platelets as prognostic/diagnostic biomarkers, giving special emphasis to its study on inflammatory and neurological/cognitive pathologies.