I am a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor with an independent laboratory focused on defining metabolic features of pancreatic tumors that could be exploited in novel therapeutic strategies. I completed my Ph.D. at Institut d'Investigació Biomédica de Bellvitge / Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain, 2013) and my postdoctoral training at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute / Harvard Medical School (Boston, USA) in the laboratories of Dr. Alec Kimmelman and Dr. Joseph Mancias. I established my independent laboratory in 2022. I am member of the Steering Committee of the Translational Cancer Network.
My laboratory uses a multi-disciplinary approach to investigate how pancreatic cancer cells reprogram their metabolism to support growth and drug resistance. We study this from a tumor perspective, but we also aim to understand how metabolic cross-talk within the tumor microenvironment modulate immune responses. Our research combines quantitative proteomics and metabolomics with in vitro/in vivo models of pancreatic cancer. With these approaches we aim to identify metabolic vulnerabilities and develop effective therapeutic strategies, including drug combinations with clinically approved metabolic inhibitors that can circumvent resistance. Our studies have identified pancreatic cancer vulnerabilities in iron-dependent pathways (Santana-Codina, Cancer Discovery, 2022) and pyrimidine nucleotide metabolism (Santana-Codina, Nature Communications, 2018; Zhang and Santana-Codina, Nature Communications, 2025).
