From left to right: María Mittelbrunn and Andreea Ciudin.
The researchers María Mittelbrunn and Andreea Ciudin have won the Jesús Serra Research Awards in the basic and clinical research categories, respectively. In this year’s sixth edition, the Prize has increased to 50,000 euros in each category, with the aim of reinforcing Fundación Occident’s support and commitment to research.
“Fundación Occident continues to invest in the talent of young researchers to promote progress in food, nutrition and health. Our aim is to provide these scientists with the visibility they deserve and, by supporting their work, to actively contribute to building a healthier society” says Laura Halpern, Vice-President of the Occident Foundation.
María Mittelbrunn, tenured scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and director of the Immunometabolism and Inflammation Laboratory at the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Centre (CSIC-UAM), has received the award for her research on how to rejuvenate the immune system and delay the onset of age-related diseases. Specifically, she studies T cells, key immune system components that with age suffer from changes in their metabolism that affect their functionality, causing chronic inflammation. The prize will allow María and her team to invest in new nutritional strategies that stimulate the metabolism of T-lymphocytes. The aim is to reverse the deterioration of T cells and immune systems, thus delaying age-related diseases.
“We are seeing that nutrition can reactivate or rejuvenate the impaired immune system and thus delay age-related diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases,” Mittelbrunn declares.
Furthermore, the prize awarded to Andreea Ciudin, senior researcher at the Diabetes and Metabolism Research Group at Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) and Coordinator of the Obesity Unit of the Vall Hebron University Hospital, recognises her outstanding career in research, specifically in the treatment of obesity, where she has always explored new ways of understanding the origins and development of this disease. Specifically, with the support of the award, she can continue to work on the development of software with artificial intelligence that accurately assesses body composition and energy expenditure at rest, which will allow personalised nutritional therapies in obesity management. Thanks to the monetary award, the researcher and her team aim to identify phenotypes with different patterns of obesity in patients, extracting information from the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and computed tomography images. This will open the door to an integrated approach to obesity, which includes personalised nutritional therapies, to improve adherence to early treatment and thus prevent the appearance of comorbidities associated with obesity.
It should be taken into account that these comorbidities, such as type 2 diabetes, advanced liver disease and cardiovascular diseases, cause a substantial cost to the NHS.
“Obesity is a disease that affects many people and has a wide range of factors that affect its development. This is why research is being undertaken from different angles. In our case, we use artificial intelligence to better understand its patterns and thus be able to approach it with a comprehensive and personalised treatments”, says Ciudin.
Jesús Serra Research Awards Ceremony
The awards ceremony will take place at 7:00pm on Wednesday, 20 November, at the Beatriz Auditorium in Madrid. The presenter Jorge Fernández will be the master of ceremonies for the third year. The event can be followed online on the Fundación Occident YouTube channel.
In addition, with the aim of creating spaces for interaction between research on food, nutrition and health and its beneficiaries, the workshop “Can obesity be prevented?” will also be held on 20 November. As part of the celebration of World Children’s Day, the event will focus on childhood obesity. The workshop, which will be held prior to the ceremony in the same venue at 17:00, will be attended by Andreea Ciudin as a guest researcher, among other speakers.