CONICET SCIENTISTS RECEIVED THE L'ORÉAL-UNESCO PRIZE "FOR WOMEN IN SCIENCE" FOR THEIR STUDIES AGAINST CANCER
The 13th edition of the L'Oréal-UNESCO National Prize "For Women in Science" was awarded in Buenos Aires on Monday, in collaboration with the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET).
The program seeks to reward scientific excellence through the promotion and encouragement of women's participation in science, an area in which, to date, they occupy only 30 percent of top roles.
The projects of this edition were framed in the Life Sciences. In this sense, the national award 2019 was granted to Dr. Vanesa Gottifredi - Principal Investigator of CONICET at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires - for her project "Identification of new drugs usable in the design of precision treatments for breast and ovarian cancer: functional validation and revelation of the mechanism of action".
This means that Gottifredi studies why a cell becomes cancerous and how chemotherapy works, in the hope of making this therapy more accurate, and eventually, replaced by a better option.
AUDIO 1- Vanesa Gottifredi - Principal Investigator of CONICET at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires.
/// I'm head of the laboratory at the Leloir Institute. Our project focuses on finding new treatments for breast and ovarian cancer. We focus on a defect that is the loss of certain proteins, which facilitates cancer but at the same time are an Achilles Heel that allow the entry of a treatment. In that sense, it is possible to develop drugs that more accurately attack only the cells with that Achilles heel to cells without that "weakness".///
The other winner was María Florencia Cayrol -Assistant Researcher of CONICET at the Institute of Biomedical Research of the Catholic University of Buenos Aires- for her project on the optimization of oncological treatments with low side effects of different types of malignant tumors.
AUDIO 2- María Florencia Cayrol- Assistant CONICET Researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Research of the Catholic University.
/////Basically we work on the effects that thyroid hormones have on tumour growth. Specifically, I have been working on the search for new treatments and on tumour biology. The project looks for new types of therapies for different types of cancer including lymphomas, breast cancer and melanomas. And it is not to seek new therapies but to improve existing therapies.
To all this, the Secretary of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation of the Nation, Lino Barañao, stressed the need for women to participate more in science not only as a right, "but because they bring a different vision, because in general women's research has a different focus: they tend to apply knowledge to improve the quality of life of the other.
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