Focus on Science With Jose Cancelas-Perez, MD, PhD

Focus On highlights faculty, staff, students and researchers at the UC Academic Health Center. To suggest someone to be featured, please email uchealthnews@uc.edu.

Jose Cancelas-Perez, MD, PhD, is an associate professor of pediatrics at the UC College of Medicine and director of the research division at Hoxworth Blood Center. He received his medical degree from Autonomous University of Madrid in 1989 and both completed his residency and received his PhD from the University of Alcala de Henares, Madrid, in 1993 and 1996.

Prior to coming to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in 2001, Cancelas-Perez did work similar to that of his current projects with stem cells and blood in the Netherlands and Spain. He conducted research at the Hospitals Ramon y Cajal (Madrid), Duran I Reynals (Barcelona) and the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

How long have you been with UC?
"After postdoctoral work in Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and Hoxworth Blood Center from 2001 to 2003, I became a UC faculty member in October 2003.”

What is your current research focus?
"My interest is to understand how blood is formed and how we can develop therapeutically efficient blood products. On one side, my basic research group is interested in understanding the basic intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms that regulate blood formation in the bone marrow. We are dissecting the signaling mechanisms that control hematopoietic stem cell, or cells from which all blood cells are made, function and different genetic programs that control their proliferation, survival, differentiation and migration. On the other hand, my clinical trial group is interested in generating, developing and validating new blood products that satisfy current demand of safety, efficacy and availability.”

How soon do you expect your findings to impact patient care?
"Some of our projects will probably impact patient care within the next five to 10 years. These are projects where we are improving the efficacy, safety or availability of blood products that are already being used therapeutically. Other projects focus on basic mechanisms of blood formation and blood transformation into cancer. These projects are basic research projects and will require longer phases of testing in preclinical and clinical trials to impact patient care.”

What do you like to do in your spare time?
"Enjoy my family, my wife and two children. My daughter Paula is 11, and my son Victor is 9. My wife, who is a faculty member of the pediatric radiology department at Cincinnati Children’s, and I don't have too much spare time, but the time we do have is spent with our family.”