Laura Orellana

Laura Orellana

Assistant Professor
Visiting address: BioClinicum - J6:06, Akademiska Stråket 1, 17164 Solna
Postal address: K7 Onkologi-Patologi, K7 Forskning Orellana, 171 77 Stockholm

About me

  • I am a computational and structural biophysicist with a medical background
    and passionate about physics and mathematical modelling. My aim is to
    understand life mechanisms and human diseases at the atomic scale: how
    protein structure, motions and biological function is shaped by evolution and
    perturbed in human disease.
    2022: Karolinska Institute Interdisciplinary Incubator (KIRI) Grant
    2021: Sagens Foundation Award
    2021: Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council) Starting Grant in Medicine
    2021: Petrus och Augusta Hedlunds Foundation Grant
    2021: Cancerfonden (Swedish Cancer Foundation) Junior Investigator Award
    2020: Jeanssons Foundation Young Leaders Starting Grant
    2020: Karolinska Institute Research Foundation Special Grant
    2019: Karolinska Institute Tenure-track Faculty Position with start-up grant
    Award (KI Allocation of faculty funded career positions 2019)
    2019: O.E. och Edla Johanssons Research Grant
    2016-2018: Sven och Lily Lawski Foundation Fellow
    2014-2016: KTH Physics Department Fellowship
    *Academic Honors*
    2006: Extraordinary Prize for Academic Excellence in Biochemistry, University
    of Barcelona
    *Other Awards*
    Biophysical Society Travel Award, New Orleans, US (2016)
    EMBO Biomolecular Simulation Bursary Award, Institute Pasteur, Paris, France
    (2012)
    IUBMB-FEBS Young Scientist Program Fellow Award, Seville, Spain (2012)
    EMBRACE-Rigaku-EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute) Bursary Award,
    Cambridge, UK (2009)
    *2010–2014: PhD in Physics /summa cum laude/*/, /Faculty of Physics,
    University of Barcelona
    /Thesis: /“Protein Dynamics and Function studied by coarse-grained and
    atomistic theoretical approaches”/ /
    *2008–2011: Clinical training* (M.D. degree, 2nd cycle, up to 345 out of
    500 ECTS), Hospital Clínic de Barcelona & Hospital Universitari Sagrat Cor
    *2008 –2010: MSc in Biophysics*, Faculty of Physics, University of
    Barcelona
    *2006 – 2007: MSc in Structure & Function of Proteins*, Barcelona
    Autonomous University
    *2003–2005: BSc in Biochemistry with Extraordinary Prize & minor in
    Physics*, Faculty of Biology, University of Barcelona
    *1999–2003: Medicine* (M.D. degree, 1st cycle), Faculty of Medicine,
    University of Barcelona
    *Academic appointments*
    *Nov. 2020: Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Medical Sciences*,
    Karolinska Institute
    *2019-2020: Researcher (Forskare) in Structural Biology*, Stockholm
    University
    *2014-2018: Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Biophysics & Cryo-EM*,
    Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) & Stockholm University (Science for Life
    Laboratory, SciLifeLab)
    *2008-2014: Graduate Student in Protein Biophysics & Molecular
    Modelling*, Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona & Barcelona
    Supercomputing Center

Research

  • My group develops theoretical methods and algorithms to predict
    conformational changes in proteins, and apply them to the in-depth
    integrative study of mutations, with the aim to generate new mechanistic
    hypothesis and test them /in vitro/ and/ in vivo./
    For more information check the KI website of our team:
    https://ki.se/en/onkpat/research-team-laura-orellana-protein-dynamics-and-cancer-lab
    A complete publication list may be found at Google scholar and
    ResearchGate.

Articles

All other publications

Grants

  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2022 - 31 December 2025
    Cancer is a unique disease in which cells acquire positive traits for survival, mirroring species evolution. Classical methods to identify driver mutations aim to detect the signatures of Darwinian positive selection, which appear as 3D-clusters of dozens of mutations in localized regions of protein structures. Such methods cannot explain the reasons for mutational clustering, which requires understanding how the protein structure is linked to function: the so-called conformational changes. Here we propose to apply an innovative methodology that pushes genomic data towards conformational mutation profiling using simulations, structural techniques, and molecular biology. We have successfully applied this approach to the oncogene EGFR, revealing how heterogeneous missense and deletion mutations evolutionarily converge in glioblastoma to a similar structural-functional effect, and thus respond to the same drugs. Our findings shed light on how apparently diverse mutations can be biochemically equivalent, reducing the complexity of tumor heterogeneity to fewer evolutionarily selected traits. Our preliminary results indicate evolutionarily convergent structural traits appear in many other unexpected proteins such as sugar transporters, channels and pumps. This project aims to explore in the extent and role of molecular convergence in cancer in two phases -computational and experimental- with the goal to understand the biological effect of mutations and rationalize cancer therapy.

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