PhD student shines at international conference
PhD student shines at international conference
Wednesday 19 August 2015
PhD student Basma Al-Sudani ‘s work on novel cancer drugs has won ‘Best Research Presentation’ at an international conference.
The second-year doctoral student from the School of Environment & Life Sciences presented her work at EuroMedLab 2015 in Paris, where it was selected for the top prize from 2,000 international submissions. Because of her success, she was invited to summarise her work in seven slides which have been published in a special supplement of the journal Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine. To top up her success, she has now been invited to address the Drug Discovery 2015 Conference, in Telford, UK.
Mrs Al-Sudani, a clinical biochemist supervised by Dr Patricia Ragazzon, said it was a “great honour” and a testament to her hard work and the support of her supervisor.
Her work into ‘Novel therapies for cancer treatment designing high affinity and selectivity ligands against sirtuin 1 protein’ builds on research to establish once and for all the dual mechanism of this protein and the possibility of using it as a target for killing selected cancerous cells.
Combating cancers
The final phase of Basma’s work will be to test the biological activity of sirtuin1 in different types of cancer and establish its function. In those cancers where sirtuin1 is over-expressed, her project will look at the prospects of blocking it and combating cancerous cells without causing ill effects to the organism.
Basma came to Salford having earned a scholarship from the Iraqi Government, and is assistant lecturer at the University of Al-Mustansirya.
Dr Ragazzon said: “Basma has gone the extra mile to set up the techniques for the development of aptamers and is producing extremely high quality research. I could not ask more and am delighted her effort has been recognised nationally and internationally.”
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