Skip to main content
Institute of Dentistry - Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
  1. Institute of Dentistry
  2. People
  3. Profiles

Dr Fabian Flores-Borja , BSc (Hons), MSc, PhD, FHEA

Fabian

Lecturer in Immunobiology

Email: f.flores-borja@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 207 882 8654
Room Number: Room G.82, Blizard Institute

Profile


Dr. Fabian Flores-Borja is a Lecturer in Oral Immunobiology at the Centre for Immunobiology and Regenerative Medicine, Institute of Dentistry.

He graduated with a degree in Biology (Hons) in 1990 and completed an MSc (1997) in Immunology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In 1998, he won a 3-year scholarship from the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT, Mexico) to conduct a research course in Immunology at the Department of Immunology and Molecular Pathology, University College London (UCL). He was awarded his PhD degree in 2002 for his thesis “Characterisation of the mouse glycosylphosphatidyl-inositol-phospholipase D (GPI-PLD) gene”.

As a postdoctoral research fellow, Fabian joined and collaborated in research projects in autoimmunity at the Bone and Joint Research Unit at the William Harvey Research Institute, QMUL (2002-2005) and at the Centre for Rheumatology, UCL (2005-2012). In these positions, Fabian studied the abnormal BCR-associated signalling in B cells from patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and characterised the function and phenotype of regulatory T and B cells in patients with SLE or rheumatoid arthritis ( https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/779894 ).

In 2012, he moved to the Breast Cancer Now research unit at King’s College London (KCL) to learn about and research the role of innate and adaptive immune cells in the tumour microenvironment. During his time at KCL, Fabian collaborated in different projects involving patients’ samples and animal models of head and neck and breast cancer, the aim of these projects being the identification of biomarkers for early diagnostic or prediction of response to treatment.(https://www.europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com/news/65879/imaging-technique-predict-breast-cancer/) 

In 2018 Dr. Flores-Borja was appointed as a lecturer in Immunobiology at QMUL

 


Centre: Centre for Oral Immunobiology and Regenerative Medicine

Teaching

 

Dr. Flores-Borja leads the teaching of immunology to undergraduate dental students (Year 1 and 2, Dentistry BDS) and lectures on several of the postgraduate courses (MSc in Experimental Oral Pathology) in the Institute of Dentistry.

Fabian supervises students in the Student Selected Components (SSC) for Dentistry (Year 3), and Research Projects for Biology BSc students.

In addition, Fabian is a lecturer on the “Translational Medicine of Cancer” course for MSc students at the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine, King’s College London.

Research

Research Interests:


At QMUL, Dr. Flores-Borja is setting up projects to analyse the role and cross-talk of adaptive and innate immune cells in cancer and autoimmune diseases with oral manifestations

Current projects include:

The role of gd T cells in the formation of ectopic lymphoid structures in salivary glands of patients with Sjögren’s syndrome

The cross-talk between gd T cells and B cells in patients with Behcet’s disease undergoing immunotherapy treatment.

Beta Defensins 2 and 3 as biomarkers for screening of oral cancer in high-risk populations.

Regulation of mast cell activity in periodontitis (Collaboration with Dr. Rommel Chacon-Salinas, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico)

Publications

  1. Soria-Castro R, Chávez-Blanco AD, García-Pérez BE, Wong-Baeza I, Flores-Mejía R, Flores-Borja F, Estrada-Parra S, Estrada-García I, Serafín-López J, Chacón-Salinas R. Valproic acid inhibits interferon-γ production by NK cells and increases susceptibility to Listeria monocytogenes infection. Sci Rep. 2020 Oct 20;10(1):17802. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-74836-w. PMID: 33082490; PMCID: PMC7576816.
  2. Gómez V, Eykyn TR, Mustapha R, Flores-Borja F, Male V, Barber PR, Patsialou A, Green R, Panagaki F, Li CW, Fruhwirth GO, Ros S, Brindle KM, Ng T. Breast cancer-associated macrophages promote tumorigenesis by suppressing succinate dehydrogenase in tumor cells. Sci Signal. 2020 Oct 6;13(652):eaax4585. doi: 10.1126/scisignal.aax4585. PMID: 33023985.
  3. Rodríguez-López GM, Soria-Castro R, Campillo-Navarro M, Pérez-Tapia SM,Flores-Borja F, Wong-Baeza I, Muñoz-Cruz S, López-Santiago R, Estrada-Parra S, Estrada-García I, Chávez-Blanco AD, Chacón-Salinas R. The histone deacetylase
    inhibitor valproic acid attenuates phospholipase Cγ2 and IgE-mediated mast cell activation. J Leukoc Biol. 2020 Jun 1. doi: 10.1002/JLB.3AB0320-547RR. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 32480423.
  4. An Z, Flores-Borja F, Irshad S, Deng J, Ng T. Pleiotropic Role and Bidirectional Immunomodulation of Innate Lymphoid Cells in Cancer. Front Immunol. 2020 Feb 4;10:3111. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2019.03111. PMID: 32117199.
  5. Evans R, Flores-Borja F, Nassiri S, Miranda E, Lawler K, Grigoriadis A, Monypenny J, Gillet C, Owen J, Gordon P, Male V, Cheung A, Noor F, Barber P, Marlow R, Francesch-Domenech E, Fruhwirth G, Squadrito M, Vojnovic B, Tutt A, Festy F, De Palma M, Ng T. Integrin-Mediated Macrophage Adhesion Promotes Lymphovascular Dissemination in Breast Cancer. Cell Rep. 2019 May 14;27(7):1967-1978.e4. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.04.076. PMID: 31091437.

All publications

OR

Pub Med: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=flores-borja&sort=date

 

 

Back to top