Igniacio Melero

 

Dr. Melero started out in biomedical research as a resident of immunology at the prestigious department of this specialty in Hospital Universitario de la Princesa (Madrid). He completed his doctoral thesis with Professor Miguel López-Botet identifying and functionally studying natural killer cell receptors. His work obtained the Outstanding Doctorate Award. In 1994 he joined Bristol Myers Squibb Company as a researcher in cancer immunotherapy in his institute in Seattle (WA). The result of his three years of work in this environment are pioneering publications in the knowledge of costimulation of antitumor immune responses and the use of immunostimulatory monoclonal antibodies. During this period he worked with Professor Lieping Chen in the division led by Professor Karl E. Hellström. In 1998 he returned to Spain in the field of CIMA and Clínica Universidad de Navarra. In these centers he has led a multidisciplinary team working in cancer immunotherapy with cell therapy techniques, gene therapy and
monoclonal antibodies. Dr. Melero is a professor of immunology at the University of Navarra, has directed 12 PhD thesis (7 of them obtained the Outstanding Doctorate Award), and has been principal researcher in over 20 clinical trials of immunotherapy (both sponsored by industry and by the center itself). His work has resulted in three patents transferred to industry. From a bibliometric point of view, Dr. Melero has an h-index of 50 and 204 articles indexed in Medline. For his career he has been awarded the Grand Prix BIAL Medicine (2004) the Conde de Cartagena Awards of the Royal Academy of Medicine (2006), Dr. Durantez of the LAIR Foundation (2011) and the Cancer Research Institute Award (2017), among other honors. In 2015 he was appointed director of the Immunology and Immunotherapy department of the Clínica Universidad de Navarra. The phrase
that best defines Dr. Melero´s scientific biography is Translational Research in Cancer Immunotherapy in collaboration with pharmaceutical industry and european groups in consortia with receiving funding for the development of therapeutic strategies.