Avencia Sanchez-Mejias

PhD in Molecular Biology and Master in Biomedical Research from the University of Seville, Spain. She has had a solid career in clinical genetics, molecular oncology and synthetic biology at research centres tied to university hospitals in several countries, including Spain, the United States and Singapore.She did her PhD at the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville and post-doc at the National University of Singapore and University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. In 2018, she joined the Translational Synthetic Biology Lab at Pompeu Fabra University, led by Dr Marc Güell (George Church alumni).In recent years, she has focused on transferring the knowledge generated in these institutions to society through her entrepreneurial project, Integra Tx. Founded with Dr Marc Güell, Integra Tx is a Barcelona-based company that is creating latest-generation gene-writing tools to make advanced therapies safer and more effective. Our prototype FiCAT combines programmable nucleases with integrases to perform site specific insertions of genes of interest on any size. She is committed to helping develop female talent and encouraging coming generations to go into STEM fields.