María Jesus Vicent Docón – Head of the Polymer Therapeutics Lab

Prof. María J. Vicent (Vila-real, 24/12/73) received her Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2001 from the Univ. Jaume I (Spain), with research stays in Prof. Fréchet’s lab at UC Berkeley (USA). She transitioned to biomedical research at Inst. Biomar S.A. (Pharmamar, Spain) and later at Cardiff Univ. (UK) with Prof. Duncan, as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2004, she joined CIPF (Valencia, Spain) through a Marie Curie Reintegration contract and has led the Polymer Therapeutics Lab since 2006. She is the scientific lead of the CIPF Screening Platform (EU-OpenScreen Specialist Site) and has coordinated the Cancer Program at CIPF since 2024, also serving as Scientific Director in requested institutional tasks. She is manager at the Spanish Research Agency (AEI) in Materials for Biomedicine Subarea, sits in many International Advisory Boards (e.g. CURAM (Ireland), FormulaEx (Sweeden)) and in the Executive Board of the Controlled Release Society (CRS), where she is President-Elect. Since 2023, she has been Editor-in-Chief of the prestigious journal Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews (Elsevier).

Her research, also as part of the CIBERONC excellence network, has secured funding > €20M, including an ERC Consolidator Grant (MyNano), two ERC Proof of Concept (Polymmune & Polybraint), and multiple International projects (e.g. NanoPanTher, PINT). She has supervised 20 PhD students (4 awarded Extraordinary Prizes), with 13 ongoing. Prof. Vicent has received numerous awards: 2024 Samyang (CRS, USA), Women in Science (CRS, 2023), “Concepción Aleixandre” Women in Science (2021) or IVth and IXth Idea awards. She has been elected as Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (FNAI, USA, 2024), CRS (2021), and American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE, USA, 2019) where she chairs the international committee. She has 158 peer-reviewed publications (H-index 52, >9400 citations, i10 123) and holds 15 patents (6 licensed). In 2012, she co-founded Polypeptide Therapeutic Solutions SL (now Curapath), an internationally known CDMO with over 100 employees in Valencia and Boston.

Researcher unique identifier(s) (ORCID): 0000-0001-7771-3373

More information at http://www.cipf.es/en/polimeros-terapeuticos

See here for a summarized CV [Summarized CV]

Google Scholar – https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=Ly466TEAAAAJ&hl=es

PubMed Bibliography – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/1ZmSDV_PEn5wFk/bibliography/public/