Rafael León
Tenured Scientist, Medical Chemistry Institute, CSIC.
PhD Organic Chemistry, UAM
B.Sc. Chemistry, Universidad de Castilla la Mancha.
Since the beginning of his career, Rafael has been devoted to the development of new drugs for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs). After his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at several renowned universities: UAM, Victoria and Cambridge (the latest with Marie Curie IEF fellowship), where he developed a new organocatalytic enantioselective tandem process to synthesize highly complex 3D architectures.
In 2011, Rafael was awarded the “Miguel Servet” fellowship to start his independent career as junior group leader. His proposals are directed to the development of multitarget drugs for the treatment of NDDs, focusing on non-conventional targets like the Nrf2-ARE redox response system.
In the last years, he has been awarded the European Marie Curie Career Integration Grant, a new project from Carlos III institute based on the neuroinflammation approach to NDDs, and the Grant4Leads grant from Bayer to test new multitarget Nrf2 inducers for the treatment of retinal NDDs.
