News
19 September 2025
RNA symposium speaker spotlight - Juan Pablo Tosar
Juan Pablo Tosar is a molecular biologist specializing in noncoding RNAs and extracellular RNA biology. He earned his Ph.D. in Biology from Universidad de la República (UDELAR, Uruguay) and completed postdoctoral training in RNA biology. Tosar leads the Functional Genomics Laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in Montevideo and the Analytical Biochemistry Unit at UDELAR, where his group investigates the roles and mechanisms of small noncoding RNAs—particularly tRNA-derived fragments—in physiology and disease. His research has contributed to uncovering how extracellular RNAs circulate in biofluids, challenging traditional models of RNA stability and transport. Some important contributions include the discovery of extracellular ribosomes (Tosar et al., NAR 2020) and nicked tRNAs (Costa et al., PNAS 2023), and a recent report on the uptake and immune properties of naked extracellular RNAs (Castellano et al., Cell Genomics 2025). Since 2024, he is also the founder and chief scientist of Before RNA Diagnostics (B4-RNA), an Uruguayan-based startup exploiting nicked tRNAs and other stable extracellular nonvesicular RNAs as biomarkers for early cancer detection.