Elena Castro is Consultant Medical Oncologist in GU tumours at the Virgen de la Victoria University Hospital in Malaga, Spain, where she leads the GU cancers translational research unit as part of the Malaga Biomedical Research Institute (IBIMA). Dr Castro studied Medicine and obtained a PhD from the University of Salamanca, Spain. After training in Medical Oncology, she completed a 4-year Fellowship in Cancer Genetics at the Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden Hospital, London, UK. In 2013, she joined the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid, Spain, as a Clinician Scientist in the Prostate Cancer Clinical Research Unit.

Over the past decade, Dr Castro has accumulated expertise in cancer genetics and has worked on addressing the clinical implications of genetic and genomic variants in prostate cancer. Her current research is focused on the clinical and molecular characterisation of BRCA2 mutations and other DNA repair defects in prostate cancer.

Dr Castro has received several grants and awards for her work, including a European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Research Fellowship (2010), the ESMO Best Fellowship Project Award (2016), and a Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award (2017). To date, Dr Castro has been actively involved in several projects to identify or validate biomarkers to optimise prostate cancer treatments, as well as having presented at many national and international meetings. Furthermore, she has authored numerous articles in esteemed peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Journal of Clinical Oncology, and European Urology. Dr Castro has acted as Principal Investigator for several clinical trials in her field of specialization: prostate cancer.