Marta Cascante
Professor,
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
University of Barcelona,
Barcelona, Spain
Email: martacascante@ub.edu
Dr. Marta Cascante is a Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Barcelona in Spain. She is also the group leader for the Integrative Biochemistry and Cancer Therapy program at the Centre for Research in Theoretical chemistry at Parc Cientific de Barcelona (PCB). The primary focus of Dr. Cascante's research over the past 20 years has been in the mathematical modeling of a variety of metabolic pathways and processes. Her group has also developed a number of software tools and modeling techniques that have significantly improved our ability to perform metabolic flux and isotopomer analysis. Dr. Cascante began her scientific career in the mid 1980's in the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Barcelona studying aspartate aminotransferases and exploring the kinetics, cooperativity and control characteristics of a number of metabolically important enzymes. More recently, Dr. Cascante has been using mass spectrometry and a variety of cell culture assays to identify and characterize plant phytochemicals and other metabolites exhibiting interesting anti-tumor and cytotoxic effects. Dr. Cascante's team often uses sophisticated mathematical modeling to explore and explain many of their experimental findings.