I arrived in April of 2000 to take up a post recently vacated on the fifth floor of the Department of Physiological Sciences (“Unidad de Reproduccion y Desarrollo”) of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. Interestingly, despite the vacated post belonging to that of Dr. Croxatto, he remained my neighbour for the next five years, along with Dr. Villalon, Dr. Claudio Barros, Gabriela Noa, Dr. Pilar Vigil and Dr. Maria Josefa Seron. On my arrival I was informed that my future office needed to be repainted and a desk was to be purchased. No funds were available to buy a computer. The then Dean of the Faculty of Biological Sciences, Dr. Renato Albertini, graciously sent me to La Serena for a few weeks while my office was renovated.  My laboratory however was not as easy to obtain. No funds were available to remodel the fifth floor, but I was assured that it was a priority for the department. Taking matters into my own hands I contacted the British Council and pled my case to the then British Ambassador to Chile. He very kindly introduced me to “Fundacion Andes” who offered me US$12,000 in equipment funds if I could match the amount from another source. Dean Albertini, Head of Department Dr. Mauricio Boric and Dr. Villalon matched the funds and sent an architect to my office. I got to design my laboratory right down to the number and the height of the bench tops and shelves. The  inauguration was at the end of 2002 in the form of a party within the lab, followed by an outing to Coopers Brew Pub of forty members of the department (a good night was had by all and to this day I am not aware of so many members of the department spontaneously participating in a social event).

The first students to work in my lab were Andres Carvajal, Mauricio Pinto and Eva Bustamante. It was agreed that Dr. Villalon was to be Andres’s Ph.D supervisor and I was to be co-tutor. However, when Andres went to register with the then Head of the Doctoral Program, Dr Patricio Zapata, he returned to my office to inform me that Dr. Zapata had decided that I was to be his tutor. Mauricio Pinto become my second Doctoral student, who together with Masters student Sumie Kato and biochemist Carolina Monso, started work on our first FONDECYT grant looking at the interaction of the EGF and progesterone signalling pathways in breast and endometrial cancer cells. Sumie was to become the matriarch of the laboratory and motor behind the “Tissue Factor Project” which took the form of a Wellcome Trust grant in 2003 and a later FONDECYT grant in 2006. This Wellcome grant enabled the purchase of large equipment (including a film processor) and travel funds for students to spend up to six months at Imperial College London (lab Dr. Jan Brosens). Moreover this grant served to consolidate the laboratory.

In parallel, a side project in collaboration with Dr. Rodolfo Medina (Universidad Andres Bello and my brother-in-law), Dr. Francisco Nualart, Dr. Maria de Los Angeles Garcia and Dr. Juan Carlos Vera (all Universidad Concepción) started to look at GLUT regulation in the presence of sex steroid hormones. This project quickly led to several of the labs early publications and the graduation of my third Ph.D student Ana Maria Meneses (together with Dr. Medina) in 2006.

Sumie Kato upon graduation (MSc) moved back to the School of Medicine where she started work with Dr. Mauricio Cuello. Sumie acting as the link between the two Schools, together with Ph.D student Anil Sadarangani and undergraduate student Soledad Lange (later doctoral student), started to use primary cancer tissue to examine the role of the antitumour agents TRAIL, 2-methyoxestradiol and statins in endometrial and ovarian cancer. Anil graduated as my fourth Ph.D student in under 3.5 years and stayed on to be the labs first post-doc in 2007, before moving to UCSD.

An important event in the labs development was my attendance at the 2003 ALIRH in Cuba. This gave me my chance to interact scientifically with Dr. Croxatto and Dr. Pedro Orihuela, collaborations still ongoing to this day. Also on this trip I recruited the undergraduate students Evelyn Aranda and Ethel Velasquez to enter my laboratory the following year as Ph.D students. Evelyn incorporated into the Tissue Factor Project (angiogenesis) while Ethel, under the initial supervision of Dr. Croxatto, continued on a project looking at variants of FSH. Evelyn and Ethel graduated in 2008. 

In 2006, with the arrival of Marisol Quezada and Soledad Henriquez, the female gender started to dominate the lab (“the gallinera”). Together with Maria Loreto Bravo, who had already performed her undergraduate thesis in the laboratory and then entered the doctoral program, they were joined a year later by Marcarena Vargas. The permanent technician post was held by Maria Paz Jaque who had recently taken over the position from Natalia Espinoza. Evelyn and Ethel were in the final years of their thesis and Sumie was, as always, ever present. The undergraduate student was Estefania Espinoza. With Anil as the only male student, the preceding years were marked by an increase in noise stemming from the laboratory and several eventful “Sociedad de Biologia Celular” meetings in Pucon (see Gallery). 2006 also brought the arrival of yet another woman, Miss Juliet Owen-Medina. In a very special moment, Juliet was welcomed into the world by the entire lab the day after her birth in Clinica Las Condes (see Gallery). 2006 also marked the attainment of Tenure and the position of Associate Professor.

The last three years of the first decade have marked a change in the laboratory from pure basic science to applied research. The teaming up with Dr. Alexis Kalergis and the pharmaceutical company Recalcine to gain two FONDEF grants and the Biomedical Research Consortium (Personalized Cancer Therapy) spearheaded this change. The incorporation into the FONDECYT and FONDEF grants of Dr. Carlos Fardella also moved the laboratory into the field of hypertension. The FSH project championed by Ethel Velasquez as a Ph.D student, has lead to both national and international patent applications as Dr. Velasquez performed her post-doctoral fellowship in my lab and initiated the start of a new FSH-orientated FONDECYT grant. The FONDEF grants have allowed the recruitment of the biochemists Hector Quinteros and Pamela Gonzalez into a lab run on a day-to-day basis by Barbara Oliva. Dr. Ana Maria Avalos, a former student of long time collaborator Andrew Quest, has become the most recent member to join the laboratory as a post-doc. The future holds the promise of widening the collaboration network to many of Santiago’s hospitals and making a lasting impact on cancer research in Chile.