Dr. Spella is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Patras, Greece. She graduated from the Biology Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and completed her postgraduate studies at the Medical School of the University of Patras, where she obtained a doctorate in Biomedical Sciences.

Today the research interests of Dr. Spella span around lung cancer and in particular the identification of mutations (changes of the genetic material) caused by various carcinogens contained in tobacco smoke, as well as the identification of the cell population in the lungs in which these mutations occur and cause cancer.

In her recent study she discovered that targeting epithelial cells that cover the airways of the lungs can reduce the chances of developing lung cancer, including the most common lung cancer subtype called adenocarcinoma. Adenocarcinoma is a disease caused largely by the harmful chemicals found in cigarette smoke, which cause mutations in the genetic material of the epithelial lung cells resulting in the creation of tumors.

One of the genes most frequently mutated in adenocarcinoma is called KRAS. Until now the identity of the cells that caused the mutations of that gene in response to smoking was not known. In her eLIFE publication, Dr. Spella describes that carcinogens contained in tobacco target primarily the airway epithelial cells of the lungs and subsequently induce mutations to the KRAS gene. Thus, these cells become very important for the initiation of the carcinogenesis in the lung. In fact, experimental animals from which those cells were absent showed less lung tumors. Therefore, clarifying the role of these specific epithelial lung cells in the early stages of cancer induction paves the way for targeted treatments for lung adenocarcinoma.