Marta Moya Jódar

I am a postdoctoral researcher working in the Toepfer Group aiming to help find a cure for Friedreich’s Ataxia. Friedreich’s Ataxia is the most common hereditary ataxia affecting 1 in 25,000 to 50,000 people. FA is a neuromuscular disease which can present with a cardiomyopathy. It usually appears between the ages of 5 and 15 and causes a progressive reduction and eventual loss of mobility. In my current position at the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine (CVM), my research utilises patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (iPSC-CMs) to elucidate innovative therapeutic strategies for the treatment of FA cardiomyopathy, interfacing with CureFA/FARA on a project kindly supported by the Christalina Foundation.

I completed my BSc in Biotechnology and subsequent MSc in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the University of Murcia (Spain). During my MSc I had the opportunity to undertake a research project at Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research (MCCIR), focusing on the identification of new pathways involved in the inflammasome, which mediates inflammatory responses in response to infection and cellular stress. I developed this project during a summer internship at the University of Manchester. Following this, I transitioned into cancer research, investigating the role of exosomes in breast cancer and their use in the diagnosis/prognosis of the disease at the University of Granada (Spain). I then studied telomerase detection methods in exosomes derived from cancer cells at the Medical University of Vienna (Austria).

Before coming to Oxford, I started utilising human iPSCs (hiPSCs) during my PhD and as a postdoc in the Department of Regenerative Medicine at CIMA-Universidad de Navarra (Spain). I conducted a research project focused on the naïve conversion of hiPSC and its application for generating human-animal chimeras, analysing the contribution of these cells at different stages of the embryo development in order to produce humanized organs to find a solution to the unmet need for transplantation organs.