DrJavier Barallobre Barreiro

Associate Professor in Cardiovascular Extracellular Matrix Biology

Javier Barallobre-Barreiro is a Molecular Biologist by training and the focus of his research is the biology of the cardiac extracellular matrix (ECM). His PhD (2011, University of A Coruña, Spain), focused on the study of cardiac remodelling in a porcine model of ischaemic injury. During that time, he visited King’s College London to collaborate with Prof. Manuel Mayr’s group and develop an approach to study for the first time cardiac ECM remodelling using mass spectrometry. He joined King’s in late 2011 as a postdoctoral researcher to continue with this research line. He improved the available strategies to study the cardiovascular ECM and investigated the role of ECM protein fragmentation in other cardiac diseases. In 2016 he was awarded a Career Establishment Fellowship at King’s, and in 2019 he obtained a BHF Intermediate Basic Science Research Fellowship, focused on the investigation of the roles of extracellular proteases and proteoglycan remodelling using preclinical models of heart failure and clinical samples. BHF support for his line of research was further extended in 2024.

In addition to his mentor, Prof. Mayr, he collaborates closely with the Institute of Biomedical Research and the Heart Failure and Heart Transplantation Unit at A Coruña University Hospital (Spain), the Semmelweis University Heart and Vascular Center (Hungary), the School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine & Sciences at King’s College London (UK), and the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (UK).

In 2024 he was promoted to Senior Lecturer at the School of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine & Sciences (King’s College London). In May 2025, he joined the National Heart & Lung Institute (NHLI) at Imperial, where his group continues to study ECM remodelling in cardiovascular disease and development.