Tumour suppression, cellular senescence, SASP and innovative therapies

Our research aims to study the molecular mechanisms controlling cellular senescence to reveal new targets for cancer and ageing treatments, and to address the outstanding fundamental question about the origin and function of the senescent cell state. Our group has been vital in discovering the SASP and its dependency on innate immune signalling, and in unravelling transcriptional programs upon senescence-associated nuclear stress and chromatin organisation. We use high-throughput approaches (e.g. proteomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics) combined with focused phenotypic screens (e.g. loss of function genetic RNAi or CRISPR screens, and small chemical compounds) to identify critical functional candidate genes and pathways regulating cellular senescence and the SASP, state of the art molecular and cellular biology methods to characterise their mechanism of action, and preclinical animal models and analysis of human samples to investigate their relevance and functionality in vivo.