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Assistant Professor, Genetics 

Research Interests

Keywords: Computational Genomics, Breast cancer research, Cancer Biology, Cancer genetics, Bioinformatics, Translational biology, RNA sequencing, Spatial transcriptomics, AURORA.

Dr. Garcia-Recio received her Ph.D. in the School of Medicine at the University of Barcelona, Spain. In 2015, she joined Dr. Charles Perou’s laboratory at the University of North Carolina at the Department of Genetics and was awarded a Susan G. Komen Postdoctoral Fellow to pursue the identification of genetic drivers in non-basal breast cancer subtypes. During her postdoc, Dr. Garcia-Recio identified a potential genetic driver of metastatic disease, the fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR4) gene. She demonstrated that the survival activity and proliferation derived from FGFR4 activation induced the departure from luminal-like programming toward HER2E-like subtype, which predicted a worse clinical outcome for breast cancer patients. She became Research Associate in 2020 and has been appointed as Assistant Professor in August 2022 to continue working on finding new target therapies for metastatic patients.

As part of the molecular working group in the Aurora US project, her goal is to find the key targets of metastatic tumors in the next few years. Through the combination of state-of-the-art sequencing technology and high-resolution microscopy, her goal is to improve the accuracy of defining gene expression profiles of breast cancer patients. Additionally, by using in vivo mouse models and human breast tumor biopsies she hopes to estimate the heterogeneity of epithelial and immune cell types in primary and metastatic paired tumors and identify breast cancer drivers specifically associated with metastasis.

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Publications:

Susana Garcia Recio in UNC Genetics News

Susana Recio Garcia
  • Genetics