Dr. Baselga, a world-renowned medical oncologist from Barcelona, and founding director of Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology, passed away at 61 years of age.Dr. Baselga received his M.D degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and started his residency in Internal Medicine at Hospital Universitari Vall d'Hebron. He subsequently completed a fellowship in Internal Medicine at Hospital Kings County in Brooklyn, and a fellowship in Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He returned to Spain in 1996 as a tenured Professor at the UAB and as coordinator and head of the Medical Oncology Service of Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, where he created the Department of Oncology, a pioneer, multidisciplinary department that is an international benchmark in the integration of basic, clinical, translational research into patient care. By this approach, recent research findings can be rapidly incorporated into clinical practice.That is the leitmotif of VHIO, established in 2006, of which Dr. Baselga was the founding Director until his departure to USA.In 2010, José moved to Boston, USA, to lead the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital, with more than 100 researchers, and served as a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. During this period, he maintained an intense research activity at VHIO.From 2013 through 2018, Dr. Baselga served as Physician-in-Chief at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. In 2019, he was appointed Executive Vice President for Research and Development in Oncology of the pharmaceutical company, AstraZeneca, UK.He was a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), and founder of the FERO Foundation, a foundation for research in oncology.Throughout his career, Dr. Baselga received numerous awards and honors, among them, the Rosenthal Family Foundation, the Pezcoller Award, the Jaume I Award, the Trueta Medal, and the Catalonia International Prize.A pioneer in personalized medicine for the treatment of cancerLong before the human genoma was mapped, from his early professional years, Dr. Baselga adopted an approach that relied on the biological fundamentals of diseases. The combination of excellence of multidicisciplinary medical teams and the promotion of translational research rapidly spread and has been adopted by numerous hospitals in Spain and worldwide.His vision and leadership led to his appointment as President of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) and, subsequently, of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), where he fostered new approaches to future challenges. The same capacities led Dr. Baselga to be named Director of the MGH General Cancer Center in 2010 and of the Memorial Solan Kettering Center Cancer."In all the positions of responsibility he hold, Dr. Baselga applied his scientific spirit with rigorousness, pursued knowledge and innovation with passion, and created teams of professionals with the same working capacity to fight cancer", says Dr. Josep Tabernero, current director of VHIO and Head of the Service of Medical Oncology of Vall d'Hebron University Hospital. "His vision and tenacity in advancing in the field of personalized medicine for the treatment of cancer were crucial to the incorporation of numerous therapeutic agents into clinical practice, when pharmaceutical companies had doubts on whether to continue or not developing these agents. The most representative example is trastuzumab (Herceptin), which has contributed to save the life of so many women with breast cancer", adds Dr. Tabernero, who worked with Dr. Baselga for many years.From Vall d'Hebron Institute of Reserach (VHIR), we want to express our deepest condolences to his family and friends of Dr. Baselga, a universal scientific reference, a pioneer who took the oncological research of Vall d'Hebron to an extraordinary level.