Justine Grixti, a Master of Science (Medicine & Surgery, by research) student at the University of Malta's Department of Pathology, has recently won the Best Poster Award at the Genomics Research Europe 2013 conference, which was held in Barcelona on the 16 and 17 October.
Ms Grixti, who hails from Santa Lucija, has travelled to Spain in order to attend this conference and present her scientific poster through a travel grant funded by the Faculty of Medicine & Surgery Dean's Initiative Fund of the University of Malta.
The research project illustrated in Miss Grixti's award-winning scientific poster identifies a new class of genetic factors, known as micro RNAs, which appear to be linked with resistance to chemotherapy in tissue culture versions of human acute myelocytic leukaemia. This link is also believed to work by switching on or off the production of specific variations of individual genes. This allows the cancer cell to become more resistant to chemotherapy medications.
The utility of Miss Grixti's research project lies in the fact that confirmation of such a link, through ongoing experiments, will lead to the possible development of diagnostic kits to immediately recognise if the leukaemic cells of any patient can resist specific chemotherapy drugs. Consequently, the medical consultants will have fore-warning and can therefore choose more effective chemotherapy drugs based on such information.
This research project, for which Miss Grixti is currently reading for completion of her post-graduate degree, is the fruit of collaborative efforts by research members of staff from both the University of Malta's Department of Pathology and the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, based at The University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.
Miss Grixti has also previously read for a Bachelor's degree in Science (Biology & Chemistry) at the University of Malta and is also currently employed as a laboratory analyst with Actavis Pharmaceuticals in Malta.