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Francisca Vazquez is the director of the Cancer Dependency Map Initiative (DepMap) at the Ó³»­´«Ã½. The DepMap is an internationally recognized initiative that aims to comprehensively map the landscape of cancer vulnerabilities. Vazquez collaborates with a large interdisciplinary team of experimental and computational scientists and project managers. They use state-of-the-art genome-scale functional genomics and multi-omics to profile hundreds of cellular models of cancers systematically.

Vazquez has launched several large-scale initiatives, including the DepMap Consortium, an industry/academia partnership to accelerate the translation of cancer vulnerabilities, and the Pediatric Dependency Accelerator to advance therapeutic discoveries in childhood cancers. She also leads the Target Discovery and Advancement lab, which focuses on identifying and validating the most promising therapeutic targets emerging from DepMap. She has led numerous target discoveries including WRN for MSI-high cancer and PELO for FOCAD-deleted cancers.

Vazquez’s main goal is to help accelerate precision cancer medicine by creating key resources for the scientific community, such as DepMap and PedDep, and identifying and validating the most promising targets and biomarkers.

Before joining the Ó³»­´«Ã½ in 2011, Vazquez worked as a post-doctoral fellow and research scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she studied cancer metabolism and tumor suppressor genes. She earned her Ph.D. from the UIB in Spain.