Lúcia Santos was distinguished with the Gerd Döring Award (by the European Cystic Fibrosis Society) and the Innovator of the Year Award (by the University College Cork) for her application of gene editing tools within Cystic Fibrosis investigation.
In the 46th European Cystic Fibrosis Conference, that took place in Vienna, Lúcia Santos received the Gerd Döring Award 2023. This award is attributed to distinguish an exceptional young scientist within the CF field and comprises a grant of 5.000€ to support her research.
This year, Lúcia Santos (who is currently working at Gen IBET) was selected to receive the award, acknowledging her scientific contributions to CF field, reported in the paper Mutation class dependent signatures outweigh disease associated processes in cystic fibrosis cells. Here, Lúcia evaluated differentially expressed genes and proteins unveiled common and mutation-specific changes revealing functional signatures that are much more associated with the specific molecular defects associated with each mutation than the CFTR loss-of-function phenotype. Her findings will likely contribute to the identification of new therapeutic targets and/or biomarkers for the disease.
Additionally, the young scientist was distinguished with the Innovation of the Year Award, by the University College Cork. This award – that recognizes researchers’ efforts on the creation of intellectual property (IP) that has the best potential to be commercialized via a new service or product – was attributed to Lúcia Santos for the results from a project supervised by Patrick Harrison, from that university, and co-supervised by Carlos M. Farinha, PI of CF Research Group at BioISI, that aims to develop novel gene editing tools and to use them to understand the types of cells in the airway epithelium that need to be targeted to restore CFTR in cystic fibrosis.
Find out more about Lúcia Santos’s investigation here.
Lúcia Santos receiving the Gerd Döring Award [image provided by Carlos M. Farinha]
Lúcia Santos receiving the Innovator of the Year Award [image provided by Carlos M. Farinha]