Dr Zuzanna Urban-Wójciuk has received mobility funding for a 3-months stay at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She is one of four winners in the current edition of the competition International internship programme for UG young researchers – EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE – RESEARCH UNIVERSITY (IDUB).

During the stay in UAB I will work in the research group of Prof. Eva Martinez Caceres, which specializes in clinical immunology and immunotherapy. Her group developed an innovative method to treat multiple sclerosis with the use of autologous dendritic cells derived from monocytes. This therapy went through all the pre-clinical stages of testing (on cells and then model organisms) and is now in stage I/IIa clinical trial. During my stay in professor Martinez-Caceres lab I plan to learn how to induce differentiation of monocytes into dendritic cells, how to culture them and use them in functional tests. I then hope to use these skills in my day-to-day lab work in ICCVS were we’re working on immunotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer – explains Dr Zuzanna Urban Wójciuk.

Dr Zuzanna Urban-Wójciuk is member of the Cancer Immunology Group in ICCVS and implements tasks within the Research Agenda funded by the Foundation for Polish Science. She also works on the research task: “Optimization of co-culture conditions to maximize TLR9-mediated NK cell activation” funded by the National Centre for Science in the Miniatura 6 programme.

Read more about EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE – RESEARCH UNIVERSITY (IDUB) here