Leonardo Salmena, PhD, is a Canada Research Chair, Tier II in Signal Transduction and Gene Regulation in Cancer. Salmena’s laboratory is investigating the consequences of aberrant cellular signalling due to genetic mutations on the initiation, progression and therapy of various cancers.
Ongoing projects include:
- The aberrant regulation of tumour suppressors such as PTEN and BRCA1 in epithelial cancers
- The role of perturbed phosphoinositide signalling in hematopoiesis and cancer initiating cells
- Measuring the impact of microRNA in chemoresistance using CRISPR screens
Salmena is working with Joanne Kotsopoulos, PhD, and Dr. Steven Narod to examine the role of OPG and RANK-L signaling in the development of breast cancer among women with BRCA1 mutation.
PhD, Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, 2005
MSc, Department of Pharmacology, University of Toronto, 1999
- Canada Research Chair, Tier II, Signal Transduction and Gene Regulation in Cancer (2015-2020)
- Career Development Award, Human Frontier Science Program (2012-2015)
- Postdoctoral Fellowship, Canadian Institutes of Health Research (2009-2011)
- Long Term Fellowship, Human Frontier Science Program (2007-2009)
- Doctoral Research Award, Canadian Institute of Health Research (2002-2005)
- Cancer biology
- Signal transduction
- microRNA
- Phosphoinositide signaling
- Chemotherapy resistance
- CRISPR gene editing