María Jesús Varela Pulpeiro (worker in the University Information Office) won the 3rd prize in the science photography contest, A Ciencia en Imaxe, organized by the University of Santiago de Compostela.
Chus came to visit our lab and our zebrafish facility and she took several photos around. One of them was awared with the 3rd prize of the USC science photography contest.
The project for the creation of a spin-off carried out by Carlha Gutiérrez, Vanessa Pérez, Mónica Otero and Laura Sánchez has been winner of a travel to USA. Vanessa and Carlha will travel to Silicon Valley and will know from within how innovation and talent are managed in leading companies such as Google, HP, Linkedin and Facebook. They will have the opportunity to attend a workshop on entrepreneurship at the prestigious Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. In addition, they will visit the Spain Tech Center (STC) - promoted by Banco Santander, ICEX and Red.es -, a support platform for Spanish companies that want to develop their business in one of the most dynamic and competitive environments in the world, Internationalization process.
Congratulations and much success!!!
http://xornal.usc.es/xornal/acontece/2017_07/noticia_0015.html
Dr. Jenny Padua is an Indian Zebrafish Researcher, currently working on the effects of Ionising radiation on Gene expression in Zebrafishes. She is also involved in Cancer drug discovery and toxicity analysis of various traditional Indian herbal drugs causing mutations and embryonic developmental disabilities, using zebrafish models.
Dr. Jenny Padua is a recognized research guide of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University. She did her Postgraduate studies in Zoology from Holy Cross College affiliated to Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli after which she did her Pre-doctoral research in Zoology from Annamalai University, Chidambaram. She did her Doctoral Research on Radiation Biology and Cancer, under the guidance of Dr. M.R.Basil Rose at the Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli. She also did a Bachelors degree in Special Education from MPBOU & Rehabilitation Council of India and a Masters in French Literature from Bangalore University, Karnataka.
Dr. Jenny Padua is working as Asst. Professor in the Department of Zoology, Holy Cross College, Nagercoil. She is also the member of the International Society for Zoological Sciences (ISZS), Beijing, International Women's Peace Group (IWPG), Korea, International Society for Environment and Information Sciences (ISEIS), Canada, Team Member of ENO International, India, Member of Rotary International District 3212, and has also served as International Service Organiser (ISO) and Editor of Inner Wheel District 321.
She is constantly involved in Environmental Awareness Programmes and engages herself in educating women on Cancer prevention. She believes that research should not be confined to research centres or done for the sake of research publications, but rather taken forth from lab to land, to the public, for the betterment of the lives of the Women and Children of the Society.
The conference was entitled The Zebrafish: A New Partner in Biomedical Research in wich Laura talked about the wonderful advantages of the zebrafish and all the benefits it has in research.
Jeannette is performing a job placement at the University of Cambridge allowed by her PhD grant from Xunta de Galicia.
She is working with the Dr Ingo Ringshausen research group, belonging to the Wellcome Trust - Medical Research Council Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and to the CRUK Cambridge Centre (Cancer Research UK Major Centre). This group work with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) and Non-Hodgkin lymphoma researching about the interaction between malignant B cells and cells of the microenvironment to understand signalling pathways involved in the microenvironment-mediated drug resistance, disease relapse and clonal evolution.
They use patient tumour cells, mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), in vitro and mouse models and a long list of molecular biology techniques, such as the genome editing technology CRISPR/Cas9. Jeannette is going to use this strategy to detect those crucial proteins related with CLL survival.
Thus, it will be an excellent chance for Jeannette that will help her to progress a lot in her thesis project.
Last year, Pablo Cabezas got a grant from Fundación Barrié de la Maza to do a short research stay at Leiden's University (The Netherlands) in B. Ewa Snaar-Jagalska's group. This grant, together with his PhD Grant from Xunta de Galicia allows him to do a research stay for a total of six months in Leiden.
Now he is in the middle of the stay there, learning new xenotransplantation techniques and molecular cancer metabolism to apply them in our colaboration with Bruno Sainz from the UAM (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) in pancreatic cancer, and when he gets back to our laboratory, to share them with the rest of the team.
See you in a few months, Pablo!
The ZebraNanoTox project that consists of the creation of a spin-off based on zebrafish already competes for a national award.
This project won in previous competitions (BoosterWe and Idea Lugo), but now competes against 1200 projects from all over Spain. This has been selected from many applications to participate in the Yuzz Program sponsored by Santander Bank. Our PhD student Carlha Gutiérrez and our student of Master Vanessa Pérez receive training sessions in business management, creativity and innovation given by the pool of experts YUZZ, a network of more than 200 professionals.
The Santander YUZZ program will distribute 30.000, 20.000 and 10.000 euros for the first, second and third winners nationwide. In addition, the local winners of each YUZZ center will have the opportunity to travel to the world's largest entrepreneurial ecosystem, Silicon Valley (California-USA). The Santander YUZZ program with the collaboration of Fundación EY will award with 20.000 euros to the best entrepreneurial project led by a woman.
We wish good luck to our entrepreneurs.
http://xornal.usc.es/xornal/acontece/2017_03/noticia_0130.html
Congratulations to Carlha Gutierrez, Monica Otero and Laura Sanchez for obtaining the first award of IDEALUGO
This award was given by El Progreso, Abanca, and the USC.
The project involves the creation of a company based on the exploitation of services created by researchers from our Group (ZebraBioRes).
The company will focus its activities on providing toxicity and efficacy assessment services for compounds, especially nanocomposites, in an innovative and recent model organism, the Zebrafish. This model has many advantages compared to other model organisms, offering our services a wonderful distinction to provide valuable information more quickly and low cost. In addition, as a short-term R & D plan, the company will offer anti-tumor efficacy trials (using xenotransplants in the zebrafish) to Oncology patients. These studies will provide patients with the possibility of knowing in a short time the most suitable antitumor for their condition.
This two-day conference is organized by the Oxford Global team. It provides a great opportunity to learn more about the latest news in these fields bringing together academic researchers, expert presenters and the industry.
They count on the participation of different experts in these areas such as: Virginijus Siksnys, Francis Stewart, Zoltan Ivics or Barri Rosen in the genome editing field.
Thus, it was the ideal environment for learning, interaction, debate and networking.
Our PhD student Carlha Gutierrez achieved the BoosterWe grant to go to Santiago de Chile. She will work in Danio Biotechnologies for 12 weeks in collaboration with Allende Lab in FONDAP Center for Genome Regulation (CGR) - University of Chile.
BoosterWe grant supports entrepreneurs from universities in Latin America, Spain and Portugal to put in place innovative business initiatives. The program offers hands-on learning experience and business management through stays in small and medium consolidated and operating in another country in complementary projects entrepreneurs business sectors.
They spent four days learning and developing skills such us: teamwork, communication, negotiation and presenting which will help them to be able to work more effectively with other people in their present research career and in their future life.
During these days, they had the help of expert coaches in this type of abilities who guided the students to discover and improve these skills.
It was an unforgettable and a very gratifying experience that they recommend to everybody.
Our PhD students attended this science dissemination session which took place in Lugo. They participated with three poster communications about the Zebrafish applications as an animal model for biomedical research: in toxicological studies, tumor cell xenotransplantation and genome editing with CRISPR/Cas9 technology.
The guest of honor of the meeting was Dr. Ángel Carracedo who showed to the audience his most personal side talking about his scientific career.
