B Lymphocyte Biology

Almudena Ramiro received her PhD and First Class Honours distinction from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2000. In 2001 Dr Ramiro joined Michel Nussenzweig´s group at the Rockefeller University (New York, USA) as a postdoctoral fellow to study the function of Activation Induced Deaminase (AID) (Ramiro et al., Nat Immunol 2003, Ramiro et al., Cell 2004; Ramiro et al., Nature 2006).

Ramiro has been an IP since 2006, first at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), and since 2012 at Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC), where she leads where she the B Cell Biology Lab. Since becoming an independent investigator Ramiro has been interested in the role of microRNAs in B cell function. She showed that AID is regulated by miR-181b (J Exp Med 2008) and reported the role of microRNAs in autoimmunity (Immunity 2010), a work that was awarded the 2011 Biogen Idec Award for Young Investigators, and in B cell lymphomagenesis (Blood 2014, Blood 2017).

Her work has also focused on understanding AID activity in the B cell immune response. Ramiro described a new component to AID local specificity (J Exp Med 2012) and an immunosurveillance mechanism that counterbalances AID oncogenic activity (EMBO Mol Med 2015). Ramiro’s lab has provided for the first time a broad atlas of the genes subject to AID induced mutations (J Exp Med 2018) and on the role of AID in intratumoral heterogeneity (PloS Genetics 2021). More recently, using state-of-the art single cell clonal analysis, they have identified an AID-dependent pathway of plasma cell differentiation (EMBO Reports 2022)

In the last years, Ramiro has focused on the antibody immune response in atherosclerosis and has found a new atherosclerosis-associated antigen that is a target for atheroprotective antibodies (Nature 2021) and that antibodies mediate atheroprotection upon MDA-LDL immunization (Cell Reports 2022).

Ramiro was awarded a Ramón y Cajal position in 2004. She received an ERC Starting Grant (2007) and a Proof of Concept ERC Grant (2015) and grants from Health Research Grant from La Caixa Foundation in 2018 and 2022. She received the 2006 Biogen Idec Award for Young Investigators, the Banc Sabadell Award to Biomedical Research in 2013 and the Caja Rural de Granada Health Sciences Award in 2021. She was elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2022.