Young brains who do not flee or emigrate to Spain to investigate

Using light to develop clean fuels, blocking communication between tumor cells to prevent metastasis in breast cancer, predicting the damage to urban coasts that large waves linked to climate change can cause, an archaeological expedition to a lost kingdom of Africa or an opera about Poet in New York by García Lorca are some of the 58 projects that will make the BBVA Foundation's Leonardo 2023 scholarships a reality.

Researchers and creators between 30 and 45 years old, and who are at a decisive moment in their careers, will benefit from a program that is now a decade old, and which confirms that in Spain not everything is “brain drain”, but also we are able to retain and attract scientific talent. We spoke with three of them to explain their projects to change the world.

Arkaitz Carracedo: A new therapeutic target for prostate cancer

After obtaining a doctorate from the UCM in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2006, Arkaitz Carracedo decided to dedicate his life to cancer: “We must remove stigmas, and talk a little about the good news, that 50 years ago, out of every four patients who were diagnosed with cancer, only one survived more than five years, and today more than half are cured, and we are moving the barrier towards 3/4, towards 70%, that is the objective, and it is advancing very quickly, although many are assumed to be a death sentence, it must be said that the majority of those diagnosed are cured.

Since 2010 he has headed the CIC bioGUNE, based in Bilbao, whose objective is to find unique biological characteristics in cancer cells.. “It is being shown that research in Spain has quality, we are at a time in which with limited public investment and the complementation of private investment we are managing to attract talent, but my impression is that with the little we have compared to others countries, we are getting a lot of performance out of it, we are playing the Champions League with Second Division equipment,” says Arkaitz.

The BBVA Foundation will allow you to study the specific alterations at the molecular level that underpin the aggressiveness of prostate cancer for 18 months.. “These recognitions also make people realize that there is research here, young people who are starting, and attract science to society, that they understand what we do, that we are allowed to explain ourselves, and they are aware that we must support research, and that there is no country that can be an economic and social engine without investing in research.

In their laboratory they try to understand how cancer cells work, how they change over time, what tools they acquire, and how to make them more vulnerable.. “Cancer is still a normal cell that behaves in the wrong way, and we have to see what has changed in its functioning. It's like a car that can run normally, or you can tune it to make it go faster or be more flashy.. Cancer is a tuned cell, and to be able to treat it better you need to know what changes have been made to that car so that it is now a racing car,” says Carracedo.

It has focused on prostate cancer because it is a very common disease, which will affect one in six men at some point in their lives, and which is generally diagnosed, treated and cured with radiotherapy and surgery.. But since it is so common, the few who are not cured is a number that in Spain is five times that of traffic accidents.. According to the WHO, this pathology currently represents the fifth cause of death from cancer worldwide, and the second in the male population.

In recent years his laboratory has identified alterations in gene expression that are exclusive to metastatic prostate cancer.. Specifically, a molecular process called 'UFMylation' (proteins modified by UFM1), which is what this research project aims to study, to find out how it affects the aggressiveness of this cancer, and so that new treatments can be developed in the future.

The Italian Martina Ferraguti, one of the beneficiaries of the Leonardo scholarship. FBBVA Martina Ferraguti: Mosquito diversity and its impact on the spread of diseases

The Italian Martina Ferraguti came to Spain to do Erasmus and stayed for love. First to the one who is today her husband and father of her son, and then to the mosquitoes. “Actually, what I liked were birds,” he confesses.. Graduated in Biology from the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, it was the first internship at the Doñana Biological Station that changed her life: “It provided me with an exceptional environment to carry out my research”. And so he began to “address one of the most relevant topics in ecology, with implications for public health: the study of the impact of biodiversity on the transmission of diseases transmitted by mosquitoes.”

He liked the subject because it covered ecology, parasitology, ornithology and entomology.. “Sometimes we believe that all mosquitoes are the same, but there are many species and, for example, the type of food, which species they bite, is a relevant difference for disease transmission.”

In her project, which has earned one of the Leonardo Scholarships from the BBVA Foundation, the biologist aims to investigate two species of mosquito present in Spain, the Culex pipiens and the Culex perexiguus, which she suspects are vectors of transmission of the usutu virus, similar to the West Nile virus, which can cause fever and headaches in people. “This virus comes from birds, so we have to investigate two species that we think feed on birds, and that can then opportunistically bite humans and transmit the pathogen.”

Before in Spain this virus was not searched for, “but now that it is done we see that it is becoming more and more frequent,” says Ferraguti.. Due to climate change, “we are increasingly moving towards more complicated situations, temperatures are increasing and mosquitoes are very dependent on temperatures, now there are mosquitoes all year round, there are species that did not exist before, that reproduce faster and with more abundance, they adapt.”

To do his job, Ferraguti will first have to catch mosquitoes on the ground with traps that use dry ice, which produces a vapor that they mistake for the breath of mammals and, when they approach, a vacuum cleaner attracts them.. Already in the laboratory they are frozen and separated by sex, since only the females will be studied, which are the ones that bite to obtain the proteins they need to generate the eggs, and among these those that have a red abdomen, that is, they are have recently fed. Then the blood is extracted and a PCR is done amplifying the DNA, and the sequencing is entered into a database that can confirm with great precision the specific species that has been bitten.

There is also another species involved in the research, the blackbird, which is a reservoir for the pathogen, explains the biologist: “That is why it is important to know which species feeds the most on the blackbird, because that has implications for pest elimination strategies, as well as Instead of carrying out indiscriminate campaigns, and spending a lot of public money, they could limit themselves to them”. The ultimate goal of the work is to help prevent and control the potential for invasion of the virus and contribute to developing public health strategies.

The doctor in telecommunications Adriano Pastore. FBBVA Adriano Pastore: Artificial Intelligence to coordinate autonomous cars

The doctor in telecommunications Adriano Pastore has a biological resume that did not predict an end as a researcher in Spain. Born and educated in Munich, to an Italian father and a French mother, he moved to Spain eleven years ago to work at the Catalonia Telecommunications Technology Center (CTTC): “I have found stable and conducive conditions to develop as a researcher.”

Assume the FBBVA scholarship as “a personal and professional achievement”, but also as a “responsibility”. On the one hand, “carry out research with tangible and demonstrable results”; and the most difficult thing, knowing how to “explain it to the general public.”

While the world lands as best it can on 5G, telecommunications researchers like Pastore have been working on 6G for some time: “One of the main challenges of telecommunications is the growing number of information flows: the greater the number of users who use a network or channel, the less capacity there is.

In most cases of communication of multiple data streams, when transmitting different signals (by cable or wireless means) different paths are reserved, so that if two people separated by half a meter of distance call on their mobile phone, the signals do not cross. The base station receiving the data has to be able to encode the signals separately and this process consumes even more bandwidth.

In this search for more efficient processes in the exchange of information, Adriano Pastore has returned to an idea presented in academic literature more than a decade ago, but which has not yet found an efficient way to become a reality: wireless computing (Over the Air Computing, OTAC according to its English acronym by which the system is known).

Signals from a swarm of drones or a future fleet of autonomous vehicles will no longer need to be collected and encoded by the central node to then collect and encode the response signal, and add or calculate the average value of both signals.. “The key to this new paradigm,” explains Pastore, “is to take advantage of what until now was considered interference,” that both signals reach the node at the same time, so that the signal that is now discarded makes the process more efficient, without It may be necessary to reserve different channels or time periods for each signal and then process them, otherwise both are processed simultaneously. “We can take advantage of a physical phenomenon, the superposition of waves, since if the signals travel over the air and are received at the same time they overlap: the wireless medium, the air, overlaps the signals, that is, it already does that sum.. You just have to do a reconstruction of the signal, that of that sum.”

Pastore considers that in addition to validating this idea from a theoretical level, he could test the system in his experimental station, something that has not yet been successfully achieved.. “Now it would be possible thanks to the new algorithm refinement processes offered by artificial intelligence through deep learning and neural networks, in the search for coding that allows efficient sum reconstructions and that corrects possible errors,” explains Pastore. .

If successful, this system would not only make the information exchange processes more efficient, but would offer a great advance in security, given that no machine would centralize all the data, operating in a federated manner, and therefore the amount of data exposed to a vulnerability would be lower.