BarataJoão T. Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular MedicinePortugal

João T. Barata is Lab Head at Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine, and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon University, Portugal, where he is chair of Oncobiology for medical students and coordinator of the Masters in Oncobiology. He received an ERC Consolidator Grant to study the mechanisms of IL-7R signaling in cancer in general and acute lymphoblastic leukemia in particular and two ERC Proof-of-concept grants to explore the therapeutic potential of his findings. He also received a la Caixa Research award to study the impact of IL7R in lung cancer and a Worldwide Cancer Research (UK) grant to study the crosstalk between sphingosine kiases and IL7R-mediated signaling in leukemia. He has received numerous grants from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FTC), the Portuguese science-funding agency, and from other national and international sources, including a European consortium grant from the Fight Kids Cancer Program of the European Science Foundation to develop and characterize T-cell leukemia patient-derived xenografts for the development of better therapeutic approaches. João’s lab has been studying the signal transduction pathways that are deregulated in cancer by cell-autonomous lesions and microenvironmental cues. His work, focused on signal transduction and the characterization of novel mechanisms driving tumor development, has identified important genetic and posttranslational alterations promoting lymphoid leukemia. For example, he showed that PTEN is inactivated not only genetically but also by phosphorylation and oxidation in T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) cells, demonstrated that IL7R is an oncogene, frequently overexpressed and/or mutated in T-ALL, and showed that IL7R drives T-ALL and B-ALL development in vivo and is a good target for therapeutic intervention. He has published in journals such as the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Science Signaling, Nature Genetics, Nature Immunology, Nature Communications, Blood, Leukemia, or Cancer Research.