Education
Maria Llamazares Prada is leading the Lung Cancer Team within the division of Cancer Epigenomics headed by Prof. Christoph Plass at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg (Germany). After her graduation in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Oviedo (Spain), she conducted her postdoctoral research at the Universities of Marburg and Würzburg, the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the BioMed X Innovation Center focusing on Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, Immunology, Cancer and COPD. Since November 2020 she has been working in the Division of Cancer Epigenomics at the DKFZ.
Expertise
Lung and tumor cryopreservation, cell isolation, scRNA-seq, epigenetic profiling with cellular resolution.
Cancer Epigenomics
- Lung Cancer (LC)
- Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary disease (COPD)
Dr. Mei-Ju Chen | Postdoctoral researcher | ||
Kathleen Schlüter | PhD student | ||
Nan Zhang | PhD student | ||
Mislav Basic | Master student | ||
Riccardo Moro | Master student |
Lung Research - Projects
1. Cryopreservation of lung and tumor tissue
In collaboration with Dr. Jurkowska’s team, we developed a novel workflow for long-term storage of human lung tissue and tumors that maintains high cell-viability and permits thorough sample revision prior to cell isolation, which is compatible with next generation sequencing-based profiling, including single-cell approaches and is suitable for isolating multiple cell types from healthy and diseased samples since cellular identity is not altered. Notably, cryopreservation enabled processing of samples from multiple donors in parallel, minimizing technical biases related to multiple batch processing of fresh samples often observed in NGS-based analysis. (Llamazares Prada et al, JCI Insights 2021).
2. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
Chronic lung diseases affect over 300 million people and are a leading cause of death worldwide. COPD is characterized by impaired lung regeneration and excessive inflammation. Understanding the mechanisms regulating them is essential to define novel therapies. Together with the Thoraxklinik in Heidelberg and Dr. Jurkowska we initiated a systematic epigenetic characterization with cellular resolution with the profiling of parenchymal fibroblasts (Schwartz et al, EMBO in revision) and alveolar type 2 cells (Llamazares-Prada et al, in preparation) isolated from human patients. Epigenetic alterations were observed in regulatory regions and contributed to the impaired cellular phenotypes present in each cell type.
3. Human Lung Cell multi-omic atlas
Non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is the leading cause of cancer-death worldwide. Lung tumors are multifocal and supported by a complex reprogrammed stroma that influence therapeutic responses. There’s an urgent need for greater molecular understanding of NSCLC. Therefore, we are building a Human Lung Cell Methylome, Transcriptome and Proteome Atlas to advance translational lung cancer research by providing a data resource of lung cells from healthy lung, NSCLC and tumor-adjacent tissue in close collaboration with our DZL partners in the Thorax Clinic in Heidelberg and the teams of Prof. Sotillo, Prof. Klingmüller and Prof. Lutsik.
