Raul A. Urrutia
Professor
Mayo Clinic
United States
Biography
Dr. Urrutia is a Professor of Medicine and Biophysics and directs a laboratory that studies Epigenetics and Chromatin Dynamics. Raul Urrutia member of Telethon scientific committeeHis mission is to promulgate the study and application of epigenetics and epigenomics to medicine, mechanistically and translational. He graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1987 from the University of Cordoba Medical School in Cordoba, Argentina as a MD. During medical school, he carried out research in the Cell Biology Institute at the University, where he published studies on diet-induced genomic changes during the development of pancreatic cancer. Straight after he joined the National Institutes of Health for 5 years and trained in the fields of cell biology, molecular biophysics, protein chemistry, and recombinant DNA techniques. After joining the Mayo Faculty, in 1992, Dr. Urrutia established the first laboratory dedicated to transcriptional regulation and epigenetics in normal cell populations and in diseases such as diabetes and pancreatic cancer. His laboratory has discovered diabetes-causing genes such as KLF11, which causes juvenile and neonatal diabetes as well as KLF14 for the insulin resistance metabolic syndrome. Dr. Urrutia’s laboratory has made fundamental contributions by identifying members and helping to put together the family of KLF proteins, which are critical regulators of biology and pathobiology. In the area of chromatin and epigenetics, the Urrutia laboratory discovered new HDAC, HATs, and HMTs, epigenetic pathways. All of these complexes associate with the development of cancer and are currently being explored as an extremely promising area in experimental therapeutics.
Research Interest
His research interest includes Molecular Mechanisms of Pancreatic Morphogenesis and Cancer, Zinc Finger Transcription Factors, Transcriptional Repression, Modular Structure of Transcription Factor Proteins