This month we are proud to feature Maria Cristina Trueba Sánchez as our CENLer for December 2025. Her scientific journey and passion for research have taken her from Spain to Utrecht, where she has been pursuing her doctoral thesis since 2019.
Maria Cristina is on the verge of completing her PhD, focused on a topic as fascinating as it is relevant: the study of interactions between immune cells and tumour cells at the molecular level. Her goal is to understand how these cells communicate through the cellular synapse, those contact points where “communication” occurs between healthy cells and cancer cells.
Thanks to her work, new methods are being developed to characterize these interactions, with the aim of modulating or modifying them in oncology therapies. As she herself explains, “we want to understand every detail of this interaction” to pave the way for more precise and effective treatments.
Currently, Maria Cristina and her team are exploring new technologies that allow them to obtain the highest quality data in the study of the synapse. They are also applying these advances to the analysis of T cells from healthy donors, which will further enhance the understanding of mechanisms that could be key in the development of future cancer therapies.
Beyond the laboratory, Maria Cristina is also an active member of the scientific community in the Netherlands: she is the chief editor of the CENL Newsletter, where we share stories, events, and updates from Spanish scientists in the country each month.
You can follow her work and learn more about her at @mctrueba.bsky.social.
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