Biography

Dr. Lucas B. Pontel graduated in Biotechnology from the National University of Rosario, Argentina, and obtained his PhD in Biological Sciences from the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology of Rosario, supported by a CONICET fellowship. In 2010, he visited Prof. McClelland’s lab at the University of California, Irvine, funded by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM).

In 2012, Dr. Pontel joined Prof. KJ Patel’s laboratory at the prestigious MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK), where he spent five years investigating how metabolism drives the human condition Fanconi anaemia. During this time, he uncovered the toxic effects of endogenous formaldehyde (FA) in mammals, demonstrating its role as a stem cell toxin and carcinogen. His contributions include the groundbreaking discovery that folate degradation releases genotoxic FA and the identification of patients with mutations in FA-detoxifying enzymes who develop the bone marrow failure syndrome AMeDS (Pontel, Mol Cell 2015; Burgos Barragan, Nature 2017; Dingler, Mol Cell 2020).

In 2017, Dr. Pontel was appointed Group Leader at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine of Buenos Aires (IBioBA-MPSP), where he studied metabolic sources of cellular damage and their impact on human health. Funded by the Max Planck Society and CONICET, his group revealed that cellular formaldehyde reacts with the antioxidant glutathione, disrupting redox homeostasis. This work led to a novel therapeutic strategy for acute leukaemia based on inhibiting glutathione synthesis (Umansky et al, Nat Commun 2022; Pontel et al, Redox Biol 2022; Morellato et al, Redox Biol 2021; Umansky et al, Nat Commun 2021).

In 2023, Dr. Pontel joined the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute as Group Leader in Cancer Metabolism, supported by a Ramón y Cajal fellowship. His research continues to focus on the biology of endogenous aldehydes and their role in haematological malignancies, with a particular emphasis on the cancer predisposition syndromes Fanconi anaemia and AMeDS.