Biographical sketch:

As BSc student in Buenos Aires, Alejo Efeyan studied steroid hormone signaling in a mouse model of breast cancer (Efeyan et al. Breast Cancer Res. Treat. 2004). During his PhD studies, Alejo dissected the relative contribution of different inputs that activate p53 (DNA damage response and oncogenic signaling) to its ability to exert tumor suppression functions (Efeyan et al. Oncogene 2005, Efeyan et al. Nature 2006. Efeyan et al. Cancer Research 2007. Efeyan et al. PLoS One 2009).

For his postdoctoral studies, and currently in the Metabolism & Cell Signalling Lab, Efeyan studies the links between nutrients, cancer and aging. Integration of signals from the abundance of intracellular nutrients and from the nutritional state of the entire organism is key for adjusting metabolic functions, as well as for energy storage and expenditure; and importantly, the components of these signalling cascades are generally corrupted in cancer and are drivers of the metabolic complications of chronic nutrient overload. The Efeyan lab combines mouse genetics and cell biological tools to gain insight into the genetic and environmental corruptions of nutrient signalling cascades, aiming to conceive therapeutic interventions in the context of cancer, obesity and the process of ageing.

Alejo generated the first loss-of-function and gain-of-function alleles (Efeyan et al. Dev Cell 2014, Efeyan et al. Nature 2013) in mice to understand the processes governed by nutrient – Rag GTPase signaling upstream of mTORC1 in diverse pathophysiological contexts. He continued to refine these genetic and biochemical approaches to explore the impact of nutrient signaling in the normal (Ersching* & Efeyan* et al. Immunity 2017) and the aberrant behavior of B cells (Ortega-Molina et al. Cell Reports 2021) and B-cell lymphomas (Ortega-Molina et al. Nat Metabolism 2019), in the coordination of fasting responses (de la Calle Arregui et al. Nat Communications 2021), spatial coordination of liver metabolic functions (Plata-Gomez et al. Nat Communications 2024), aging (Ortega-Molina et al., Nature Aging 2024) and to understand how common non-pathogenic genetic variants on nutrient signaling genes in the human population control systemic metabolism (Fernandez* & Deleyto-Seldas* et al. Genome Biology 2022).

Over the years, research in the Efeyan lab has been funded by Spanish National Grants (3 Retos, 1 Excellence Network), the ERC, LaCaixa, Mark Foundation, AECC, Fero Foundation, Leonardo-BBVA, MSCA-ITN, and the EMBO Young Investigator Program. Alejo has trained 4 postdoctoral researchers, 7 PhD students (3 already defended), 6 MSc students, 4 BSc students, and 6 Summer Students.

Work by Alejo Efeyan has been cited more than 9000 times with more than 500 yearly citations in the last 10 years, and an h-index is 29.

Publications: TBC

ORCID