Boris Mravec

Boris Mravec graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, Comenius University Bratislava in 2000. Subsequently, during PhD studies at the Slovak Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Dr. Richard Kvetňanskż, DSc, he focused on experimental research on central regulation of neuroendocrine stress response. After defending his PhD degree in 2005, he first joined the Institute of Pathological Physiology as a lecturer and since 2014 he has been working at the Institute of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Comenius University in Bratislava. At the same time, he works as a researcher at the Biomedical Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

Since 2005, he started to work with colleagues and PhD students on the role of the nervous system in the cancer process in peripheral tissues. During this period, several publications related to this area of research became available. However, these papers mostly focused only on some aspects of the relationship between the nervous system and cancer. Most of the papers focused on investigating and describing the influence of the nervous system on the cancer; only a small number of papers dealt with the influence of the cancer on the nervous system. Thus, a more comprehensive and unifying concept describing the bidirectional relationships between the nervous system and cancer tissue was lacking. Therefore, in 2008, he and his colleagues published a comprehensive description of the role of the nervous system in cancer and introduced the term "cancer neurobiology" to the literature.

As he specialized in the research of brain structures regulating neuroendocrine stress response during his PhD studies, the main goal of his further research activities was to elucidate the mechanisms mediating the adverse effects of stress on the development and progression of cancer. In addition, since cancer growth may also represent a specific stressor, he and his colleagues also focused on investigating the impact of cancer growth on the activity of selected brain structures. Recently, he has focused on validating the mechanisms of neuro-cancer interactions in clinical trials and on the application of the knowledge gained in the treatment of cancer patients. In 2024, he published the scientific monograph Neurobiology of Cancer in Springer Nature. This is the first monograph to describe in detail the complexity of the relationship between the nervous system and cancer.