María Jesus Vicent Docón – Head of the Polymer Therapeutics Lab

Professor MJ Vicent received her Ph.D. in 2001 in chemistry on solid supports from Univ. Jaume I (Castellon, Spain), after several scientific stays in Prof. Fréchet’s laboratory at the Univ. California (Berkeley, USA). She then moved to more biomedical-oriented research, initially with Instituto Biomar and then at the Centre for Polymer Therapeutics with Prof. Duncan after the award of a Marie Curie Postdoc fellowship in 2002. In 2004, María joined the Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe (CIPF) as a research associate through a Marie Curie Reintegration contract and was promoted to the head of the Polymer Therapeutics Lab in 2006. She is also responsible for the Screening Platform, a specialist site in the ERIC EU-OpenScreen, and coordinates the Advanced Therapies Program. She is the director-at-large of the Controlled Release Society, part of the Strategic Committee of the Valencian Agency of Innovation, a Member of the International Advisory Board of IN2UB and Foundation Hospital Provincial Castellón, as well as CURAM (Ireland) and FormulaEx/Sweden). Her research group is now a member of CIBERONC and focuses on developing novel nanopharmaceuticals for different therapeutic and diagnostic applications, particularly polymer therapeutics for unmet clinical needs. She has been funded by national (Fund La Caixa-NanoPanTher and NanoGBA) and European grants (ERC Consolidator grant-MyNano, ERCPoC-Polyimmune, and ERCPoC-Polybraint) from academia and industry. She has received several prizes, including Idea awards, Innovation and Excellence awards from Castellón or Concepció Aleixandre, and Controlled Release Society Women in Science Awards. She is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows 2019 and the Controlled Release Society College of Fellows 2021. She has co-authored >145 peer-reviewed publications and 14 patents, with four licensed to the pharmaceutical industry and one used as the foundation of the spin-off ‘Polypeptide Therapeutic Solutions SL in 2012, rebranded as Curapath after its acquisition by Arcline in 2021. She is widely invited to talk at international conferences and is currently vice-president of the Chemical Biology Section of Real Sociedad Española de Química and chair of critical conferences. María is the editor-in-chief of Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews and a board member of critical journals.

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

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