Itsaso Garcia-Arcos, PhD

Personal and scientific path to today.

My scientific journey started by obtaining a Degree in Biochemistry at the University of the Basque country (Spain). At the time, this involved three full years of General Biology and Molecular Biology, followed by two years of Biochemistry and a research project. Like many other students, in the last few years I volunteered my time (~20h/week) in a research lab. I run small tests and experiments helping very patient and dedicated graduate students who generously shared their knowledge with me until I was ready to run my own small graduation project.

It was clear to me that I enjoyed my time in the lab and I wanted to pursue a PhD. The expertise of the lab, hepatic lipid metabolism, was very appealing to me. I secured a grant to fund my doctoral project. I studied the lipid composition of the lipid droplets that form during the transient steatosis associated with liver regeneration and the specific targeting of the protein SND1 to the lipid droplets. During this time, I also enjoyed time as a visiting scientist to study peroxisomal proteomics of aging at the University of Uppsala (Sweden), and intracellular protein interactions in pancreatic cells at the University of Bordeaux (France).

My postdoctoral journey took me to Columbia University in New York. It would take volumes to describe the learning that took place in those days. Everything seemed to happen so fast in New York! I worked on lipoprotein lipase in adipose tissue and in the context of hypertriglyceridemia. This work showed that lipoprotein lipase in brown adipose tissue was essential for controlling blood triglyceride levels and that lungs had a significant role in triglyceride clearance. I followed this finding with further postdoctoral training in pulmonary science.

The current research in my lab is the natural product of my scientific background. Lungs metabolize lipids for the maintenance of surfactant homeostasis and for multiple other molecular processes for the essential functions of breathing and effective gas exchange. The challenges of studying pulmonary lipid metabolism are related with the subcellular complexity of an organ with functionally different cell types sharing geographical locations in specific niches that change and evolve with disease. At the subcellular level, the biochemical mechanisms of cellular functions become intricate and somewhat mysterious. I believe that the lipids can tell us a lot about these mysteries, and use this focus to understand pulmonary diseases.