Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Oviedo, Carlos Lopez Otín, is an internationally renowned scientist. In his lab have done outstanding work that opened the door to important research avenues for diseases like cancer, arthritis or many inherited diseases, some of them discovered by his team in the Asturian capital. Otín Lopez earned his doctorate at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1984 and since 1987 is part of the Faculty of Medicine of Oviedo, where he heads a group of basic research in molecular biology.

The fruit of their collaboration with international genomics consortia and their experience with Craig Venter for the publication of the first draft of the human genome, acquired an extensive experience in the localization of genes in different species. This experience led his group to be one of the few teams not only Americans and the Spanish who participated in the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome published in 2005. Carlos Lopez Otín is also an acknowledged expert on proteases and their role in the activity and cell death.