Marina Uroz is a Lecturer in the Physical Sciences of Life at the Centre for Craniofacial & Regenerative Biology. Her lab seeks to understand how cells respond to mechanical cues in complex multicellular tissue environments.

Marina obtained a PhD in Biomedicine from the University of Barcelona in 2018, under the supervision of Xavier Trepat. Her doctoral thesis studied how mechanical signals impact cell division and cell cycle progression in epithelial layers. Following her PhD, with the aim of moving from two-dimensional epithelial monolayers to more complex tissue environments, she joined Chris Chen’s lab at Boston University as a postdoctoral fellow and explored how the mechanical properties of the brain regulate metastatic invasion. In 2024, she moved to Sergi Garcia-Manyes’s group at the Francis Crick Institute, before taking up her current position at the CCRB in 2026.

Research interests

Living tissues are physically complex, with highly organized cellular and extracellular matrix architectures. Within these tissue environments, cells are simultaneously exposed to different mechanical cues, including local physical properties such as stiffness and viscoelasticity, as well as forces such as tension, compression, and fluid flow. We aim to understand how cells process all this physical information, and how in coordination with biochemical signals they drive processes such as development, regeneration, and disease.

One of the key questions we investigate is how the tissue physical microenvironment regulates cancer progression and metastasis. Throughout their metastatic journey, cancer cells must adapt to environments with radically different physical properties. We study how this local physical microenvironment influences cancer invasion, dormancy, and proliferation, and how it contributes to the heterogeneity of cancer cell behaviour.

To capture and study the complexity of tissue microenvironments, we combine ex vivo tissue slice cultures, which preserve tissue architecture and mechanical heterogeneity, with engineered in vitro platforms including microfluidics and synthetic matrices, which allow precise control over physical properties. Across these systems, we integrate quantitative biophysical tools like Atomic Force Microscopy or Traction Force Microscopy, with light microscopy and molecular and cell biological approaches to identify how cells sense and respond to mechanical signals.

Recent publications

• Differential stiffness between brain vasculature and parenchyma promotes metastatic infiltration through vessel co-option https://www.nature.com/articles/s41556-024-01532-6