About us
CIC bioGUNE (Center for Cooperative Research in Biosciences), a non-profit biomedical research organization, founded in 2002 at the initiative of the Department of Industry of the Basque Government, opened its research facilities at the Technology Park of Bizkaia in January 2005. Since then, CIC bioGUNE has been playing a strong role in advancing biomedical research and technological innovation in the Basque Country. To support the research activities of The Center’s scientists and students CIC bioGUNE made an investment of more than 35 million € in state-of-the-art research infrastructure - in genomics, gene silencing, proteomics, metabolomics, NMR, electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and computer and animal facilities, among others. Every year, The Center commits more than 5.5 million € to research and dedicates 450 thousand € to Ph.D. training. It employs 22 research group leaders, more than 85 postdocs, technicians and engineers, and provides training opportunities to over twenty Ph.D. students each year.
Our research workers, recruited internationally, include 15 fellows from Ikerbasque, Bizkaia:xede, and Ramón y Cajal programs. Since 2006, CIC bioGUNE has received 18 million € from competitive research grants (mainly from the European Union, NIH, and the Spanish Plan Nacional I+D+I, FIS, CIBER and CONSOLIDER programs). Various foundations (primarily BBVA Foundation and Genome Spain) and research contracts supplied further 2.7 million €.
Extramural funding, combined with the generous support of the Basque Government and the Regional Government of Bizkaia, allowed our research projects to grow and prosper. In 2009, CIC bioGUNE’s researchers authored 45 scientific publications in journals with an average impact factor of 6 and licensed its first two patents.
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We are working to give research in the Basque Country an international focus, incorporating foreign researchers at all levels and strengthening international cooperation since, nowadays, excellence is defined in global terms.
Center's Director
José M Mato
- General director
- CIC bioGUNE and CIC biomaGUNE
- Scientific director
- CIC bioGUNE
Dr. José M Mato, professor and general director of the Center for Cooperative Research in Biosciences, CIC bioGUNE, studied Chemistry at the University of Madrid. He moved to the Department of Cell Biology and Morphogenesis at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where he obtained his PhD degree in 1977. In 1980, Dr. Mato moved to the Department of Metabolism & Nutrition at the Jiménez Díaz Foundation in Madrid as an assistant professor. In 1982, he was a visiting scientist at the NIDCR-NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, and in 1986 a visiting professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In 1987 he was appointed research professor at the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and five years later the president of the CSIC. In 1997 Dr. Mato was appointed as professor of the Department of Medicine at the University of Navarra and in October 2003 moved to take up his present position as general director of CIC bioGUNE. Since 2005 Prof. Mato has combined his position at CIC bioGUNE with the position of general director of CIC biomaGUNE (Center for Cooperative Research in Biomaterials) at the Technology Park of Miramón in San Sebastián.
Scientific Profile
After graduating in Chemistry at the University of Madrid, Dr. Mato joined the lab of Prof. Theo Konijn, at the University of Leiden, to work for his PhD thesis. In Dr. Konijn’s lab he discovered that cyclic AMP, a chemotactic signal during cell aggregation in Dictyostelium discoideum, acts by increasing the synthesis of cyclic GMP. This work not only opened a new area of research in the field of D. discoideum but also had impact in other fields, such as sperm chemotaxis.
In 1982, while visiting the lab of Dr. Elliott Schiffmann, at the NIH, Dr. Mato became interested in methionine metabolism, particularly in the “lipotropic effect of methionine”, a well-known phenomenon by which a diet deficient in methyl groups (methionine and choline) induces fatty liver disease and hepatocellular carcinoma in rodents. Work carried out in his lab in 1988 demonstrated that the first step in liver methionine metabolism, the synthesis of S-adenosylmethionine (SAMe), is markedly impaired in individuals with liver cirrhosis independently of its etiology. This work prompted numerous studies on the therapeutic significance of SAMe in liver disease that led, ultimately, by his lab demonstrating in collaboration with the team of Prof. Juan Rodés at the Clinic Hospital in Barcelona, its usefulness in the treatment of alcoholic liver cirrhosis. Presently, SAMe is sold as a nutritional supplement in the US, and is marketed as a prescription drug in other countries including Germany and Italy.
In 2000, in collaboration with the lab of Prof. Shelly Lu, at the USC Keck School of Medicine, Dr. Mato’s lab definitively related SAMe deficiency and liver disease by showing that knockout mice deficient in hepatic SAMe spontaneously develop fatty liver disease and hepatocellular carcinoma. More recently, his lab demonstrated that knockout mice with a surplus of hepatic SAMe also develop fatty liver disease and hepatocellular carcinoma, supporting their earlier hypothesis that SAMe is a control switch that regulates liver function. A molecular explanation for these observations has remained elusive since the connection of methionine metabolism with lipid utilization and hepatocyte proliferation is, at first glance, not obvious. Recently, Dr. Mato’s lab has provided some insight into the mechanism of SAMe, lipid metabolism and hepatocyte growth interaction, by showing that SAMe regulates AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), a critical metabolic regulator, and HuR, a RNA binding protein that stabilizes numerous mRNAs involved in cell-cycle progression.
To summarize, Dr. Mato’s work has contributed greatly to move the field of methionine metabolism from a clinical nutrition’s descriptive past to the molecular and clinical forefront. His work has been recognized by several awards: the Spanish National Prize of Research in Medicine (2005), the Lennox K Black International Prize for Excellence in Biomedical Research (1994), the G.B Morgagni Young Investigator Award (1989), and the Leiden University’s Kok Prize for excellence in PhD research work (1977).
Dr. Mato’s lab has been continuously funded during the last 30-years by the Spanish Plan Nacional de I+D+I of the Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) and, as co-PI with Dr. Lu, he has been partially funded by the NIH during the last 11 years. Prof. Mato has published 228 research articles that received 7082 citations with an h index of 45. In 2002 he founded OWL Genomics, a biotech company pioneering in the use of metabolomics in biomedical research.