Dr. Carmenza Spadafora is invited as Associate Editor of the Ethnopharmacology Section of Frontiers in Pharmacology.
Opening Keynote Lecture.
Dra. Carmenza has been invited to The 69th International Congress and Annual Meeting of the Society for Medicinal Plants and Natural Products Research, International Society of Ethnopharmacology, Bonn, Germany. Access and benefit sharing under the Nagoya Protocol – Quo Vadis?
New Ph.D. student. Welcome, Lina Solis!
The group has welcomed Lina Solis as a Ph.D. student from Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá to pursue a biotechnology doctoral degree looking for the identity of a protein in P. falciparum that seems to participate in the apoptotic death of the parasite.
For the second consecutive year, Dr. Carmenza Spadafora was part of the designated committee reviewing proposals for the Innovation Pitch Contest of ASTMH
The Innovations Pitch Competition is a TED Talk-style, rapid-pitch session held in front of a live audience at the Annual Meeting. Five finalists are selected to pitch their innovative ideas for a monetary prize. Winners have obtained $3,000, $5,000 and $10,000 award money to help them kickstart their ideas. This activity took place at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Dr. Correa has been selected for the prestigious Arturo Falaschi ICGEB Postdoctoral Fellowship
Dr. Ricardo Correa was selected for the prestigious Arturo Falaschi ICGEB Post-doc Fellowship awarded by the ICGEB Cardiovascular Biology Group at ICGEB Trieste (Italy) with Dr. Serena Zacchigna for the year 2020. He stayed a year and a half learning cutting edge techniques on organoid printing, adenovirus as targeted therapeutic delivery tool, CRISPR CAS and much more. Two of his publications with the ICGEB are depicted below.
Dr. Ricardo Correa: New graduate of the successful PhD program of Acharya Nagarjuna University of India and INDICASAT AIP of Panama.
His thesis on suicidal signals carried by Extracellular Vesicles of Plasmodium falciparum resulted in three important publications:
Extracellular vesicles could carry an evolutionary footprint in interkingdom communication. Ricardo Correa, Zuleima Caballero, Luis Fernando De León and Carmenza Spadafora. Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology. 03 March 2020 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fcimb.2020.00076
Extracellular vesicles carrying lactate dehydrogenase induce suicide in increased population density of Plasmodium falciparum in vitro. Ricardo Correa M, Lorena M Coronado, Zuleima Caballero, Paula Faral, Carlos Robello and Carmenza Spadafora. Scientific Reports 9, Article number: 5042 (2019
Volatile organic compounds associated with Plasmodium falciparum infection in vitro. Ricardo Correa, Lorena M. Coronado, Anette C. Garrido, Armando A. Durant-Archibold and Carmenza Spadafora. Parasites and Vectors. 2017 May 2;10(1):215
A summary of these findings was presented in the recent conference of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Washington, D.C. Big congratulations!
Visiting Prof. Hyan-Ju Park from South Korea shared her knowledge with our lab team
Dr. Hyan-Ju Park, Professor at the School of Pharmacy of Sungkyunkwan University, in South Korea, spent some months with us sharing her expertise in medicinal chemistry, which was very valuable to our group of bioassays in parasites of tropical diseases and cancer. Some of the best molecules that we have published together with our collaborators were analyzed with her and new ideas for progressing analogs of those natural products were discussed. This is headed to be an important Panama-South Korea collaboration in the area of drug discovery. This exchange from visiting Prof. Park adds to the similar ongoing work established some years ago between our group and the Ocean University of Qindao, China.
The Unit of Biomedical Physics and Engineering of INDICASAT AIP acquires sophisticated equipment from MMI (Germany) and Olympus (Japan).
The equipment comprises Optical Tweezers, a nano force measurement device and a CellXtor. Optical Tweezers are able to hold nanoparticles with the use of laser beams. Their generated force fields, are able to exert a pressure on the particles, and placed in opposite directions, the two lasers trap and manipulate their target in between the fields. This allows, among other things, the application of strain or stress forces that can give exact information on the physical properties of a nanoparticle. The CellXtor can mark single cells or particles of interest and collect them, one or many at a time, to deposit them into a dish well for further use. One of the first projects to utilize the new technology will use the Optical tweezers to measure the elasticity of red blood cells.
This equipment was acquired through competitive funding from the National Secretariat of Science, Innovation and Technology of Panama. It will be available for users from any institution that want to conduct studies using this technology.
Kurt Ngo graduates with another interdisciplinary project
