Tomás Clive Barker Tejeda

I am a researcher specialised in metabolomics and its application to translational studies in the healthcare field. I obtained my international PhD cum laude in July 2024, after a long journey in metabolomics that started in November 2016. Both my Bachelor’s and Master’s thesis discussed the application of GC-MS in the study of allergic diseases. The former was applied to a clinical study of grass-pollen sublingual allergen-specific immunotherapy, while the latter analysed a transgenic mice model of allergic enteritis in collaboration with the Paul Ehrlich Institut in Frankfurt and the Tohoku University in Japan (published in Allergy in 2020 and 2024 respectively, see Publications). I was awarded the Excellence Scholarship by the UCM to pursue my Master’s Degree.

In my thesis, I investigated a multiplatform study of cow’s milk allergy in young infants, their mothers, and grandmothers, under the supervision of Dr Marina Pérez Gordo and Dr Alma Villaseñor. In 2022, I was able to spend three months (May-July) in the Britz-McKibbin lab at McMaster University, Canada (Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology), as an international PhD student, learning and applying the innovative multisegment injection (MSI)-CE-MS methodology to my thesis project.

During my PhD I have been able to present my work at several international congresses, in the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) Congress in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023, and in Metabolomics 2020, 2021 and 2023. I had the great honour of receiving the Metabolites Best Poster Award in Metabolomics 2020, and the 2023 Metabolomics Society Student Travel Award allowed me to return to Niagara Falls, Canada and present an oral communication.

Part of the results from my thesis –metabolomics, genomics, and the integration of both in the three-generation cohort of our study– were published recently in Nature Communications. This article was awarded “Article of the Month” in July 2024 by the Sociedad Española de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular (SEBBM) and was highlighted by Springer Nature as part of the collection for World Microbiome Day 2024 (https://www.biomedcentral.com/p/wmd-2024). We are currently in the process of publishing the results regarding diet, mode of birth and allergy of the infants.

I am a co-author of 14 publications, 5 of them as a first or co-first author, and 13 of which (93%) are indexed in the Q1 of at least one SCIE category. I have also been a junior member of the EAACI since 2018 and of the Metabolomics Society from 2020-2021 and 2023. My main scientific interest is developing and applying methodologies targeting bile acids (BAs) and other relevant gut microbiota metabolites, as well as integrating metabolomics with sequencing techniques that characterize the gut microbiota (such as metabarcoding, based on the analysis of phylogenetic markers, shotgun metagenomics, and metatranscriptomics). I aim to paint a fuller picture of microbiota and host interactions and how they relate to health status and disease, especially regarding diet, age, and allergic pathologies.