Vall d’Hebron University Hospital
Barcelona, Spain
Judith Balmaña is the Head of the Hereditary Cancer Genetics Group at Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO). In 2005, she was hired to establish the Familial Cancer Program in the Medical Oncology Department at Hospital Vall d’Hebron (HVH). Since then, she has been leading this program and serving as an Attending Physician in the Breast Cancer Unit.
She was awarded a scholarship by La Caixa for a clinical research stay in hereditary cancer at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute (Boston) between 2002-2004. She returned to Barcelona in 2005 and in 2009 she obtained a PhD in Medicine at the Universitat Autònoma Barcelona (UAB). She is a Professor at the Faculty of Medicine in the International University of Catalonia, and the hereditary cancer track coordinator of the Master in Genetic Counseling (UAB). In 2015 she obtained a grant from Sociedad Española de Oncología Médica (SEOM) for a 6-month stay as a Visitor Scholar at the BASSER Center in Philadelphia (USA) with Dr. S. Domchek.
Within SEOM, she has served as Member of the Executive Committee of the Hereditary Cancer Section for four years, she is a professor of the online course of Hereditary Cancer (10 editions) and since 2018 she is a member of the Hereditary Cancer Accreditation Committee. In ESMO she has been participating in the ESMO Guidelines for hereditary breast and colon cancer since 2010, Faculty Coordinator of Cancer Genetics (2017-2021), and chair of the ESMO Preceptorship in Hereditary Cancer since 2019. She is also a member of the SOLTI’s Cooperative Group in breast cancer. She co-chairs the Hereditary Breast Cancer Thematic Group within the European Reference Network in Genetic Tumor Risk (ERN-GENTURIS) since 2017 and she is an active member of the international research consortium CIMBA, working in hereditary breast cancer. In 2018, she co-authored the European Breast Cancer Council (EBCC) manifesto on genetic risk prediction testing in breast cancer to ensure genetic risk testing is carried out in national health services according to the latest evidence-based guideline, and encourage health professionals to participate in European networks and research programmes about all aspects of genetic testing.
She has actively been working in national and international hereditary breast cancer guidelines, including SEOM, ESMO, ASCO and ACMG (American College of Medical Genetics). Her interest in the genetic epidemiology of hereditary breast cancer has linked much of her research with the VHIO and HVH Oncogenetics Laboratory, while her translational research in breast cancer is focused on identification of biomarkers and mechanisms of resistance to targeted therapies for BRCA-associated tumors, in collaboration with the Experimental Therapies Lab at VHIO. She has been awarded with consecutive national grants since 2012, and is an investigator collaborator within the ERA PerMed grant. She has published more than 160 scientific manuscripts and is peer reviewer of international scientific journals and funding agencies.
Dr Balmaña is interested in unravelling the challenges of implementing the advances in diagnosis of hereditary cancer susceptibility to clinical practice. She is proactively working on implementing the gene panels for hereditary cancer, and delineating the professional framework to provide an adequate genetic counselling process for individuals undergoing genetic testing. She is involved in national and international collaborations for clinical research projects, guidelines, and consulting boards in hereditary cancer.
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
13:30 – 13:50