Elena Criscuolo, a young researcher at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, is the winner of the “Cecilia Cioffrese” 2018 Award for viral diseases, an award for young researchers in Virology.
The prize, in fact, is the best known award among those awarded by the Carlo Erba Foundation for young promising researchers in the fields of cancer and viral diseases.
Dr. Criscuolo, graduated in Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Biotechnology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, where she also obtained a PhD in Molecular Medicine, works in the laboratory of Prof. Massimo Clementi, Professor of Microbiology and Virology UniSR and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine; together with her colleagues, she studies the humoral response to infections caused by viruses. “The unit I belong to has focused on herpes viruses, particularly Herpes Simplex 1 and 2” she says. “The project I presented in the selection phase proposed to characterize the molecular interactions that take place before the virus enters the target cell, in the hope of identifying new possible therapeutic targets“.
“This award represents an important recognition on a personal level, but above all of the work carried out by our Unit: the results already achieved and published have allowed us to understand new aspects of the virus biology and to hypothesize applications that have not yet been addressed by the scientific community. The Institute has played a key role both from the practical point of view, thanks to the available tools and the possibility of contact between different research areas that converge in the same place, and from the educational point of view, as I have achieved here both Degrees in Biotechnology and the Research Doctorate”.
