PEOPLE

Sacri R. Ferrón

Group Leader
Associate Professor

Sacri R. Ferrón

Sacri R. Ferrón is an Associate Professor and director of the Imprinting and Neural Stem Cells Laboratory of the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the University of Valencia. She has authored or co-authored over 30 publications in the field of neurobiology, with relevant contributions to neural stem cell biology and epigenetics of genomic imprinting in the adult brain. Her studies helped to identify molecular mechanisms that regulated self-renewal in adult neural stem cells (NSCs). She has also contribute to describe the properties of expansion of NSCs from adult mammalian brain as it was a real demand in the field to improve the culture conditions of multipotent NSCs to maintain them genetically stable for their potential use in cell therapy. Many of her protocols are at the moment being used in the NSCs field. During her postdoc period she was awarded with the “Herchel Smith Fellowship in Stem Cell Biology” from the University of Cambridge. In 2012 she moved to University of Valencia where with funding from the Governments of Spain and Valencia, and from the BBVA Foundation, she established her own group. She was also awarded with the VII Prize Biogen Idec in Neurology 2012. Her last studies described for the first time relaxation or absence of genomic imprinting in somatic stem cells as a new mechanism of regulation of dosage in physiological conditions. Her studies have also defined the role of methylation and hydroxymetylation in brain function. Her research group belongs to the Spanish National Network for Cell Therapy (RETIC TerCel) and the Center for Biomedical Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIBERNED) and is a Consolidable group from the Generalitat Valenciana.