Marisol Soengas had just arrived in Madrid at the age of 21 and went to see Margarita Salas to ask her to let her help in her laboratory at the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center (CBMSO).
"He received me in a small room," recalls Soengas. I was starting 4th, I had two courses left to finish my degree. If I had known at that moment how important Margarita Salas was, I would not have been so calm. She sat in front of me, looked into my eyes and said: 'tell me'.
–And what did he tell you?
–Well, he came from La Coruña, where at that time you could only do up to third grade; that since second grade I had started to do my first steps in the laboratory and I loved it; that I had transferred my file to the Autonomous University of Madrid, and not to Santiago as usual, because the Molecular Biology Center was located here; and that he wanted to work in the best laboratory. He was listening and let me speak.
–What did she say?
He said: 'I don't have room at the moment'.
-However, he ended up working with her.
–He said: 'I don't have room but I'm going to make a hole for you. Come on Monday.
And the following Monday it began. It was the beginning of a brilliant career that has taken her to the United States and back to Spain, to become a benchmark in melanoma research and, starting this year, to preside over the Spanish Association for Cancer Research (Aseica).
In the laboratory of Margarita Salas, a disciple of Nobel Prize winner Severo Ochoa, Soengas learned a culture of scientific excellence that is normal today, but that in Spain at that time was exceptional. Researchers were trained there who later held leadership positions such as, among others, Cristina Garmendia (who was Minister of Science and Innovation between 2008 and 2011 and currently chairs the Cotec Foundation), María Blasco (a specialist in telomeres who directs the National Center for Oncological Research, CNIO) or Manuel Serrano (specialist in biology of aging, currently at Altos Labs).
It was also there that she met her husband, the neurobiologist José Antonio Esteban, who helped her purify and analyze the polymerase of a virus, in an investigation that she published before finishing her degree and that the two signed as co-authors. And where he learned English, thanks to the fact that scientific seminars were held in English every week and, above all, to the fact that he shared a flat and a bench with Vanishree Murthy, an Indian researcher "who talked a lot" and whose taste for food has remained until today. India.
She arrived at the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory in New York in 1997 as a postdoctoral researcher wondering if the English she learned in Madrid would be enough for her. The doubt dissipated when she attended her first scientific seminar “because I didn't learn anything; she spoke to an Asian researcher in incomprehensible English and was asked a bunch of questions; and I thought 'if they have understood him, surely they have understood me too'; I was cured of shame right away."
It was at Cold Spring Harbor that he specialized in melanoma because the priority at the time was understanding why tumors become resistant to chemotherapy and melanoma was one of the most resistant.
His boss, Scott Lowe, gave him “the best advice I've ever gotten; he told me: 'if you ask yourself boring questions, you will find boring answers'; since then I always think about what is the most interesting question that we can ask ourselves”.
At that time he began to collaborate with the pathologist Carlos Cordón-Cardó, from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York, to have access to patient samples. With the contact with doctors, she changed the perspective of her as a scientist. She had started as a basic researcher interested in understanding the biology of cancer and became a researcher committed to improving the treatment of patients.
A part of her successes as a scientist can be explained because “I am stubborn, non-conformist and competitive in a good way; if I challenge myself, I do it to the best of my ability”. An example of all three of these qualities was her reaction to a post posted on social media that the pull-up was not for women. She asked a gym instructor to help her make a training plan and she managed to do ten pull-ups in a row with weights. “I like to play sports -explains her-her; now I do body pump, body combat and run a little”. A little bit, for her, it's about 10 kilometers.
The University of Michigan called her as she was finishing her postdoctoral fellowship at Cold Spring Harbor. She was offered to go direct their melanoma research program. He had the option of going to more prestigious scientific institutions in Boston or New York, but Michigan University Hospital was a melanoma referral center that received more patient samples than any hospital on the East Coast and "had a genuine interest to investigate melanoma to improve treatments”, recalls Soengas.
After six years in Michigan, which Soengas remembers as "a very good experience in which for the first time I had the responsibility of creating my own research team", in 2008 he decided to return to Madrid to lead the CNIO's melanoma group.
"It was a time when there was significant support for science in Spain," he recalls. “I was attracted to the concept of a monographic cancer research center and the possibility of collaborating with the Doce de Octubre hospital. I returned with the prospect of continuing to investigate at the same level as in the United States”.
Her husband, José Antonio Esteban, joined the CBMSO as he had previously joined Cold Spring Harbor and the University of Michigan, which makes it an unusual case for a researcher to change institutions based on changes in the career of his wife and not the other way around.
Among all the research he has carried out since his arrival at the CNIO, the development of the MetAlert mouse model stands out -for Metastasis Alert-, which reveals how cancer cells spread throughout the body from the initial melanoma. Working with MetAlert mice, Soengas is now investigating how to prevent the appearance of metastases and improve their treatment in a project that the European Union has funded with 2.5 million euros.
“Twenty years ago, life expectancy when a metastatic melanoma was diagnosed was between six and twelve months. Now a large percentage of cases respond to treatments in clinical trials, ”he argues. “Everything that has been advanced in this field has been thanks to research. To continue advancing, the only option is to continue investigating.”
