Josue Curto Navarro is a Post-doctoral Research Scientist and obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Dr. Mireia Duñach at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Catalunya. During his Ph.D. studies, he was focused on the characterization of the initial signaling events of the less known non-canonical Wnt pathway. They demonstrated that canonical and non-canonical Wnt pathway have more elements in common than it was previously thought. In both pathways, CK1ε is required for Dishevelled-2 recruitment to receptor Frizzled upon pathway activation and, p120-catenin, is also necessary to keep the signalosome in a functional and activable situation. In the case of canonical Wnt pathway, p120-catenin bridges the interaction of CK1ε with E-cadherin and, in non-canonical Wnt pathway, avoids clathrin-dependent internalization of the co-receptor Ror2. They also demonstrated that in non-canonical Wnt pathway CK1ε performs an extra function avoiding Ror2 lysosomal degradation through direct interaction.
In the current lab, he is working on understanding the metabolic requirements of therapy-resistant tumor cells and the relevance of the tumor niche in this process. His major goal is to identify metabolic dependencies that enable cancer cells to overcome current therapies and provide novel therapeutic strategies to exploit the altered metabolic state.