welcome
our scientific activity
The Príncipe Felipe Research Center Foundation (CIPF) is a biomedical research institution whose staff and collaborators strive every day to achieve valuable medical advances that will benefit everyone’s health. Most of its work focuses on some of the most common and important diseases in today’s society—illnesses that still urgently require new scientific insights and expanded treatment options: cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic diseases such as diabetes, and rare diseases.
The institution currently carries out its main scientific activity within the framework of four scientific programs, managed through eighteen research groups. The research undertaken at the CIPF aims to increase the critical mass of key knowledge available to the scientific community by taking full advantage of our resources. Our goal is to increase the generation of high-impact biomedical knowledge, thereby making advances that constitute true scientific milestones, and producing results that will be transferable to applications in the health system.
The CIPF is a private scientific foundation which was established on 27 December, 1990 by the Generalitat Valenciana and the Caja de Ahorros de Valencia. It was previously known as the Valencian Foundation for Biomedical Research and its predecessor was The Institute of Cytological Research (1966).
These data reflect the position of the CIPF according to the SCIMAGO international ranking of institutions in the Area of Health Research and Biomedicine in Spain, the number of research groups and active projects we have, and the number of scientific publications released by the CIPF in 2019.
STRATEGIC PLAN
our objectives
The CIPF Board of Trustees recognizes that measures to ensure the long-term scientific excellence and financial stability of the Príncipe Felipe Research Center must be implemented over the next five years. Thus, its strategic plan includes the following measures, which were designed to accommodate our clear commitment to achieving this goal:
Research
Promote excellence in biomedical research by generating new knowledge and applying it to improve current clinical solutions. This will build on the successes of our existing research programs, bring new scientific talent into the center, help develop mechanisms to improve the impact of our cutting-edge research, and open future opportunities to exploit this work.
Organizational Competitiveness
Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the CIPF in terms of its ability to support the work of its researchers, ensuring that their treatment and the opportunities available to them all are equal.
Reputation and Communication
We are responsible for openly communicating, sharing, and disseminating our research outcomes, both with wider society and with the international research community. We encourage our scientists to communicate their research, as well as their expected results and how these might benefit society. We will create and promote a new public brand for the CIPF, which will be synonymous with high-quality science and the center's core values.
Education and Training
Position the CIPF as a leader in science education and training. The CIPF implements the human resources strategy for researchers (HRS4R) strategy. We are committed to training our researchers and promoting their career development by offering them an excellent international research center in which they can carry out their experimental work. Every year, 170 pre-doc, masters, or post-doc researchers join us, both from Spain and from further afield.
EQUALITY
OUR RESPONSIBILITY
The CIPF has put its equality promise at the forefront by establishing policies that include the equality of treatment and opportunities for all our staff, no matter their gender identity. The CIPF’s Equality Plan was developed to improve working relationships and prevent gender discrimination.
Our Equality Plan includes important measures in terms of staff selection, access to resources, training, work-life reconciliation, career advancement, remuneration, communication routes, and gender violence. When this plan was drawn up, the Center focused on its commitment to respect the principle of equality, without discrimination based on birthplace, race, sex, gender, religion, opinion, or any other personal or social condition or circumstance.
Most of these measures had already been implemented, while some of them improved upon the rights related to personal, family, and work-life balance already established in current legislation, and others included medium and long-term activities that will be put into practice over the next four years.
Research with a gender perspective
We recognize the enormous scientific importance of considering gender and sex differences in research; our firm commitment to good science is reflected in the fact that our work strives to consider gender perspectives. The failure to properly consider gender in science can, and has, resulted in differences in health and well-being outcomes. Therefore, a gender and sex-based perspective is integrated into the research and innovation strategies, programs, and projects the CIPF follows.
COMMITMENTS
OUR VALUES
Excellence
We recognize that we must implement measures to ensure long-term scientific excellence as the main basis for the generation of new knowledge that can benefit society. The work done at the CIPF is ground-breaking, collaborative, and interdisciplinary.
Collaboration
The CIPF promotes excellent research at the national and international levels which helps it to develop one of its main institutional functions: to be a local-level research engine by sharing our knowledge, know-how, and resources through collaborations with hospitals, universities, and other public and private entities in the Valencian Community.
Transparency
The CIPF is committed to public transparency and we take our responsibility for correctly managing the public funds we have been awarded to develop our strategic goals very seriously.
Innovation
We generate knowledge that promotes the creation of practical clinical applications, improves social well-being, and contributes to the improvement of patient lives.
MANAGEMENT TEAM
LEADERSHIp
Dr. Deborah J. Burks is the Director of the Príncipe Felipe Research Center (CIPF). She is also the head of the Molecular Endocrinology Laboratory at the Center and a founding member of the Center of Networked Biomedical Research (CIBER in its Spanish acronym) for Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases.
Dr. Burks is a molecular and cellular biologist who is internationally recognized for her work on receptor signal transduction in the field of diabetes and obesity. Her contributions to science include the identification and characterization of insulin receptor substrate (IRS) proteins and the elucidation of novel paradigms regarding their function in pancreatic development, female reproduction, and appetite regulation by the central nervous system.
She joined the CIPF in 2004 with the goal of transferring basic knowledge about IRS proteins into the development of innovative strategies for detecting and treating type-2 diabetes. Dr. Burks was trained in pharmacology at Vanderbilt University where she received her Ph.D. in 1990. She completed postdoctoral work on tyrosine kinase receptors at Duke University and subsequently at Harvard where she was a Mary Iacocca Research Fellow at the Joslin Diabetes Center. In 1998, she became an Assistant Research Professor at Harvard Medical School, and in 2002, she received a Ramon y Cajal fellowship to pursue research in Spain. Dr. Burks is a member of the Endocrine Society, Spanish Society for Diabetes, and American Association of University Women.
Luis Antonio
Castillo Sanz
Economic Director
Enrique
Fontes Vila
Director of Legal affairs and institutional relationships
SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD
MEMBERS
Laura soucek
Director
VHIO’s Experimental Therapeutics Research program and Group Leader of the Models of Cancer Therapies Laboratory
Luís Serrano
Director
CRG director and Group Leader of the Systems and Synthetic Biology Laboratory
José López-Barneo
Group Leader
Senior Group Leader of the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville, IBiS
Kevin Ryan
Group Leader
Group Leader of the Tumour Cell Death and Autophagy Laboratory at the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute
Jens Brüning
Director
Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research
Sharon Gerecht
Director
Institute of NanoBiotechnology,
Johns Hopkins
Michelle Bradbury
Co-Director
Sloan-Memorial Kettering Cancer Center
Leslie Vosshall
Director
Kavli Neural Systems Institute,
Rockefeller University
Josep Tabernero
Director
Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology
Antonio Zorzano
Medicine Program Head
Institute for Research in Biomedicine
(IRB Barcelona)
Adriana Maggi
Director
Center of Excellence on Neurodegenerative Diseases, University of Milan
Sabine Werner
Chair
Institute of Molecular Health Sciences, ETH Zurich
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
MEMBERS
Marciano Gómez Gómez
President
Advisor in the Department of Health (CS).
Bernardo Valdivieso Martínez
Vice president 1st
Regional secretary for Planning, Information and Digital Transformation at the CS.
Mariola Penadés Fons
Vice president 2nd
General Director of Research and Innovation at the CS.
Members
María Jesús Arilla Morell
General Director of Hospital Care of CS.
Isabel Fariñas Gómez
Tenured Professor at the Department of Cellular Biology, University of Valencia (acting in a personal capacity).
María A. Blasco Marhuenda
Director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO).
Carmen Ayuso García
Scientific Director of the Fundación Jiménez Díaz Health Research Institute.
Óscar Marín
Director of the Medical Research Centre for Developmental Neurobiology, Kings College London.
Boluda Corporación Marítima S.L.
President of the Valencian Foundation for Advanced Studies, represented by Vicente Boluda Fos.
Manuel Llombart Bosch
Acting in a personal capacity.
Deborah J. Burks
Secretary
Director of the Príncipe Felipe Research Center (CIPF).
