Elena 
López Ruiz

Elena López-Ruiz (Ph.D) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Health Sciences at the University of Jaén and is a member of the Regenerative Medicine Institute (IBIMER), and the Biosanitary Research Institute of Granada (ibs.GRANADA). She also teaches at the master's degree in Translational Research and Personalized Medicine (TransMed) at the University of Granada. She holds a PhD in Regenerative Biomedicine from the University of Jaén. During her PhD, she focused on the differentiation of adult stem cells toward cardiac and cartilage lineage.

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She was granted with a Marie Curie fellowship to carry out a research internship at Bath University, UK, with Prof. David Tosh's lab, where she got experience in the differentiation of human adipose tissue-derived stem cells (hASCs) towards chondrocytes via adenoviral infections. She carried out an additional research internship at the University of Manchester where she worked on the effect of extracellular matrix proteins on MSCs phenotype.

Following her PhD, she went to Denmark where she conducted 6 months of research at the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (Inano), at Aarhus University. During this period she was involved in the characterization of nanocarriers and the in vitro evaluation of delivery and gene silencing in chondrocytes.

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Elena has been working on several projects focused on the area of regenerative biomedicine and the study of cancer. She has expertise in the study of novel therapies for targeting CSCs and their microenvironment. In addition, she has developed experimental models of therapy against prevalent diseases such as osteoarthritis, cardiovascular diseases, and skin lesions. She is particularly interested in the application of novel tissue engineering strategies, such as 3D cultures, novel biomaterials, cell sprays, bioreactors, and 3D bioprinting for the repair of damaged tissues.

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Currently, she is the principal investigator of a competitive project whose objective is the 3D bioprinting of cartilage and bone using bioinks based on decellularized matrix (dECM) for the regeneration of osteochondral lesions.