IIS La Fe awards four mobility grants through the 'Moving Science' programme

La Fe Health Research Institute (IIS La Fe) has awarded four mobility grants to enable its research staff to carry out international stays with the aim of improving their professional skills. Through the programme 'Moving Science: Grants for the mobility of research staff', endowed with 25,000 euros, the selected persons will be able to strengthen new links with other international institutions that may lead to the development of joint research projects.

PhD students Esther Coronado, Alejandro López and Gladys Olivera and Dr. Julia Kuligowski will be the first to benefit from this line of grants aligned with the strategic objectives of the European Human Resources Strategy for Researchers (HRS4R), whose seal has been held by IIS La Fe since 2015.

Two European and two international stays

Through this line of grants, which are supported by the management of the IIS La Fe, four of its researchers will be able to carry out European or international stays that will allow them, among other things, to enhance their training by learning techniques and/or skills that they can apply to their professional competencies; to promote collaboration with other international institutions that may lead to joint research projects and to expand translational research and technology and knowledge transfer, integrating basic and clinical research.

Dr. Julia Kuligowski, who currently carries out her research in the Perinatology research group at IIS La Fe, will spend two months in the laboratory of Dr. Benedikt Warth, leader in analytical research of the exposome, located in Austria. During this period of time, Dr. Kuligowski will receive specific training that will allow her to gain experience and, in addition, she will carry out a pilot project to try to clarify a little more how natural or artificial pollutants affect premature newborns.

The second European destination will be Germany, where the pre-doctoral Gladys G. Olivera will spend her stay at the company HMG Systems Engineering, under the supervision of Herna Muñez-Galeano. This entity has developed the PGXperts system, a comprehensive support system to optimise clinical decision-making in polymedicated patients, contributing to personalised pharmacotherapy in complex scenarios. The objective of our researcher will be to optimise this software to apply it specifically to paediatric oncology patients, so we plan to use the programme on real case studies, as well as to develop a collaboration plan between IIS La Fe and HMG Systems Engineering.

On an international level and with the aim of identifying novel strategies to improve the treatment of childhood cancer, the researcher from the Clinical and Translational Cancer Research Group at IIS La Fe, Esther Coronado, will temporarily move to the laboratory of Dr. John M. Marus located at the Center for Childhood Cancer Research, Pennsylvania. Her goal is to develop a precision medicine strategy for neuroblastoma that will contribute to the prognosis and treatment of paediatric patients, providing essential information to apply new therapies targeted to each tumour subgroup.

For his part, PhD student Alejandro López, who is working on his thesis in the Serious Infection group at IIS La Fe, will travel to Brazil where, at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), he will develop nanoemulsion systems or solid systems (gel) with or without integrated antimicrobials to evaluate their correct functionality by means of in vitro and in vivo studies. Thus, after his time at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and, specifically, at the Pharmacotechnics and Pharmaceutical Technology Laboratory under the tutelage of Marlus Chorilli, the PhD student supervised by Dr Javier Pemán, Dr Alba Cecilia Ruiz and Dr Héctor Martínez will evaluate the capacity of the nanoemulsions developed as a therapeutic strategy against multi-resistant fungal and bacterial species.