Draft:María Ángela Nieto Toledano

María Ángela Nieto Toledano (born 1 March 1960 Madrid) is a Spanish scientist.

She works at the Institute of Neurosciences of Alicante, a joint center of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the Miguel Hernández University of Elche (UMH).

She won a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award, and Rey Jaime I Award.

Life

She received his PhD from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1987 for his work on protein-nucleic acid interactions (CBM SO CSIC-UAM, with Enrique Palacián as her thesis director).

In 1988, she moved to the AS Biomedical Research Institute in Madrid to study programmed cell death with Abelardo-López-Rivas.

In 1989, she joined the National Institute for Medical Research in London to work with David Wilkinson on the isolation of genes involved in the development of the nervous system. In 1993 he obtained a position as Senior Scientist (CSIC) at the Cajal Institute in Madrid, and since then he has led a group interested in cell movements during embryonic development and adult pathologies. They characterized the Snail family of transcription factors, showing their crucial role in the induction of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in embryos (1992-1994; ie Science 1994). This work already suggested that Snail reactivation could be involved in the delamination of cancer cells from the primary tumor.

In 2000, with Amparo Cano , they showed that Snail is a potent repressor of E-cadherin, conferring migratory properties and being activated at the tumor invasion front (Nat Cell Biol., 2000). This study contributed to the beginning of the Snail-EMT-cancer field identified by ISI as "Emerging Research Front" in Molecular Medicine1 In 2000, she was promoted to Scientific Researcher Director of the Department of Developmental Neurobiology and elected EMBO member. Her group later found that Snail regulates the cell cycle and confers resistance to death, favoring migration over cell division and conferring an advantage to embryonic and tumor cells to reach distant territories and form tissues or metastases, respectively (Genes & Dev, 2004).

She was promoted to Research Professor in 2004 and that year she moved with her group to Alicante, to the Institute of Neurosciences (CSIC-UMH). There they have found that the reactivation of Snail in the adult kidney is sufficient and necessary to induce fibrosis and renal failure, and that its blockage can reverse the induced fibrosis in several animal models, which has allowed them to propose a new antifibrotic therapy (EMBO J., 2006; Nature Medicine, 2015). Snail also has a prominent role in bone development and homeostasis, and its deregulated expression leads to achondroplasia (the most common form of dwarfism in humans, Dev. Cell, 2007) and to deficient mineralization in adults (osteomalacia, EMBO J., 2009). With respect to cancer progression, they have shown that EMT is a dynamic and reversible process, necessary for the dissemination of tumor cells but that must be repressed for the formation of metastases (Cancer Cell, 2012), changing the concept for the design of anti-metastatic therapies based on EMT (Science, 2013). Returning to the fundamental processes of embryonic development, their group has shown that the mutual repression between Snail and another transcription factor (Sox3) defines the embryonic territories ensuring the formation of the nervous system (Dev. Cell, 2011) and in 2017, they have described the mechanism that positions the heart during embryonic development (Nature, 2017), allowing a better understanding of certain congenital malformations.

EMT was accepted early on by developmental biologists but not so much by oncologists. However, it has now become one of the main research topics in cancer (discussed in Nieto, Ann. Rev. Cell Dev. Biol., 2011 and Nieto et al, Cell, 2016).

The main contribution of his research is the study of the epithelial-mesenchymal transition during embryonic development and its aberrant activation in various adult pathologies.