Pau studied Human Biology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, before moving to Oxford, London and the Technical University of Denmark where he obtained his PhD in Computational Biology. He then received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation to pursue his studies at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. After securing a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award from NIH/NCI, he established his lab at the University of Cambridge – CRUK Cambridge Institute in 2020 as a junior group leader in the Centre.
The Creixell Lab
The Creixell lab integrates machine learning and high-throughput biochemistry to study how proteins selectively recognize their substrates, how this process is perturbed in cancer and how it can be hijacked to find highly selective and mutant-specific drugs to overcome drug resistance. Targeted therapies have significantly improved outcomes for patients and shifted the clinical and biological goal towards targeting evolutionary trajectories and overcoming resistance. To overcome these challenges, it is critical to repurpose existing cancer drugs and design news ones with higher selectivity, lower toxicity and less prone to resistance. In their lab they combine and develop technology ranging from peptide display, deep sequencing, machine learning, drug design and functional protein biochemistry with the long-term goal to make an impact in our understanding and treatment of cancer and drug resistance in paediatric brain tumours and other cancers.
Mihkel Örd
Mihkel is a postdoctoral research fellow who is interested in (unravelling and targeting) protein signalling networks. His PhD work in the University of Tartu in Estonia was on protein phosphorylation in yeast cell cycle. He then joined the Institute of Cancer Research in London to characterise motif-mediated protein-protein interactions in a high-throughput manner. He joined Pau Creixell’s lab with a Horizon Europe Guarantee MSCA postdoctoral fellowship to investigate the therapeutic potential of targeting dynamic protein-protein interactions.
Greta Markert
Greta has two master’s degrees, from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, one in Chemistry and one in Pharmaceutical Science. She worked in IBM Research Europe on toxicity prediction using deep neural networks and at F. Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland. Her main expertise lie in computational chemistry and protein chemistry as well as machine learning.
Mingxuan Jiang
Mingxuan has recently completed studying Chemistry with Molecular Physics Master’s Program at Imperial College London, where he specialised in robotic chemistry and computational chemistry for drug design. He is now at Cambridge University working towards his PhD in Pau Creixell’s group
Nuo Cheng
Nuo is interested in using functional and computational approaches to develop the nanobody and explore novel cancer signaling arms. Before moving to the UK, he studied and worked with colleagues at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine to discover oncogenic axes in DUX4/IGH-driven leukemogenesis.
Luis Bermúdez-Guzmán
Luis is a biologist, geneticist and bioinformatician from Costa Rica. His past research was focused on human genetics, DNA repair and radiation oncology. His current research as a PhD student in the Creixell Lab is focused on the molecular evolution of tyrosine kinases. Moreover, he combines high-throughput biochemistry and structural bioinformatics in order to design less toxic and more efficient therapeutic hits to target oncogenic tyrosine kinases in paediatric brain tumours. He was awarded a PhD fellowship from the Board of Trustees of the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds (BIF) in 2022 and became an Associate Member of the Royal Society of Biology in 2023.
Teresa Augustin
Teresa is a research assistant who recently graduated from her BA and MSci in the Biochemistry Department in Cambridge. Now, she is excited to perform high-throughput biochemical techniques to explore protein-protein interactions in the Creixell lab.
James Clarke
James is the Creixell group’s lab manager. His background is mostly in stem cell research, where he enjoyed 11 years in Austin Smith’s group. He is excited to be exploring new pastures with Pau and the team, in cancer research and protein biochemistry.
The Creixell lab – September 2022
