Professor Amàlia Lafuente receives the 2015 Pharmacology Award
Amàlia Lafuente, professor in the Department of Pathological Anatomy, Pharmacology and Microbiology, has received the 2015 Pharmacology Award, given by the pharmaceutical company Almirall and the Spanish Pharmacological Society (SEF).
Amàlia Lafuente, professor in the Department of Pathological Anatomy, Pharmacology and Microbiology, has received the 2015 Pharmacology Award, given by the pharmaceutical company Almirall and the Spanish Pharmacological Society (SEF).
The prize, which celebrates its fourteenth edition, recognises and promotes pharmacological research in Spain. Professor Lafuente been honoured for the project Estudio experimental de un predictor farmacogenético de la sintomatología extrapiramidal inducida por antipsicóticos, which studies a pharmacological marker for extrapyramidal symptoms, the most common adverse effect associated to antipsychotic therapy, in order to decipher its physiopathological and clinical implications.
New artificial intelligence techniques enable to detect nonlinear gene-gene interactions and predict the risk of suffereing extrapyramidal symptoms with 85% reliability.
Amàlia Lafuente (Barcelona, 1952) is the secretary of the Department of Pathological Anatomy, Pharmacology and Microbiology of the University of Barcelona. Her research activity is centred on pharmacogenetics, a discipline that studies inherited genetic differences in drug metabolic pathways which can affect individual responses to drugs. In the future, this subject area will enable to know what drug and in what dose is better to treat each patient. She has been research associate at the University of California, Berkeley and, in 2006, she won the International Hippocrates Award for Medical Research in Human Nutrition. Moreover, she has published two medical novels: Codi genètic (Edicions 62, 2009) andTeràpia de risc (Edicions 62, 2013).