Jesús María Hernández-Rivas

Professor, Department of Medicine,  University of Salamanca

Jesús María Hernández-Rivas is Professor of the Department of Medicine at the University of Salamanca in Spain, a senior haematologist at the Hospital Universitario de Salamanca, and Head of the Research Groups in Molecular Cytogenetics at the Biomedical Institute of Research of Salamanca (IECSCYL-IBSAL) and Cancer Research Centre (CIC).

For more than three decades, he has led the Oncology Cytogenetics Unit (UCO) in the Haematology Service of the University Hospital of Salamanca, which is the reference centre for studies of molecular cytogenetics in the Community of Castilla y León, Aragon, Extremadura, and Andalucía. Prof. Dr. Hernández Rivas has published over 300 articles in international scientific journals and directed 54 research projects and 26 doctoral theses.

In addition, he has been a member of the executive committee of the Concerted Action funded by the Marie-Curie Foundation "CGH Arrays and Molecular Cytogenetics", as well as several scientific committees and advisory boards, participating in the organisation of I+D+I activities. He has also been a member of the editorial board of the journal Cancer Genetics and Cytogenetics, editor of the journal Continuing Education in Haematology and Haemotherapy, and has been coordinator of the Doctorate programme with a mention of quality "Advances in Internal Medicine."

He has been involved in many national and international research projects, such as MILE ("Microarrays Innovations in Leukaemia"), IRON (“Interlaboratory Robustness of Next-generation sequencing”), and NGS-PTL ("Next Generation Sequencing Platform for Personalised Therapy for Leukaemia") programme of FP7-HEALTH-2012 INNOVATION-1.

At present, he is the Project Coordinator of the Project HARMONY PLUS “Healthcare alliance for resourceful medicines offensive against neoplasms in haematology – PLUS” (Grant agreement 945406) approved by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI2), which is part of the Big Data for Better Outcomes initiative (BD4BO) of the Horizon 2020 projects. HARMONY PLUS continues HARMONY’s work, a European Network of Excellence that captures, integrates, analyses, and harmonises Big Data from high-quality multidisciplinary sources for the purpose of acquiring valuable knowledge across the spectrum of haematologic malignancies. The aim of HARMONY PLUS is to build on HARMONY’s work, adding additional blood cancers to the list of diseases under study and turning the existing HARMONY platform into an integrated services platform that will improve clinical decision-making and clinical trial design.

Prof. Dr. Hernández Rivas is also the project coordinator of the ERA PerMed project SYNtherapy “SYNthetic Lethality for Personalised Therapy-based Stratification in Acute Leukaemia.” Moreover, he currently leads another European project: NEMHESYS “NGS Establishment in Multidisciplinary Healthcare Education SYStem” (an Erasmus+ project) and participates in oncNGS, a H2020 project that aims at developing novel affordable NGS solutions both for solid and haematological tumours. He is also participating in the EU projects IMPACT, CAN.HEAL, and RESOLVE.

Prof. Dr. Hernández Rivas’ group works on the molecular characterisation of tumoural cells from haematological malignancies (chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, myelodysplastic syndromes), the application of CRISPR/Cas9 in the study of blood disorders, and the integration of genomic high-throughput technologies for the study of cancer.

Updated: September 2024