Jose Bayascas, who is undertaking postdoctoral research in Dario Alessi's Group, has been awarded a Ramon y Cajal grant to set up his own independent laboratory in Spain. Ramon y Cajal awards are a new initiative funded by the Spanish government to recruit talented individuals to undertake independent research at Universities throughout Spain. The fellowships are awarded competitively based on the candidate's past achievements and proposed future research project. This award provides Jose with a five-year tenure track position, which he intends to take up at a University in Barcelona in 2007.

During his postdoctoral research, Jose generated and analysed several genetic models to evaluate the roles of the PDK1 signalling pathway in mice. A vital finding he made was the demonstration that lowering the expression of the PDK1 kinase markedly protects mice from developing cancers that arise from the loss of the PTEN tumour suppressor. This study published recently in Current Biology is important as it suggests that drugs that inhibit PDK1 could be of use for treatment of cancer in humans. Jose has made several other interesting observations that we hope to publish soon.