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By Juan Carlos Martinez
Indicasat-AIP located in the City of Knowledge with a staff of almost 60 people is at it again. The Institute is housed within a two-story building covering almost 1200 square meters, (12,916 square feet) and is equipped with a diversity of high technology equipment employed in the biomedical and chemical fields. In recent months Indicasat-AIP has been in the news for diverse reasons. Some of Indicasat's lead team members Carmenza Spadafora and Jose Stoute have identified the protein that the malaria parasite uses as a receptor in order to enter the human body and infect the red blood cells. It is the Complement 1 Receptor (CR1). This discovery may allow the creation of a vaccine now that the protein has been identified and quite possibly it may block the establishment of the malaria parasite within the human body.
Malaria is a disease that kills approximately 2.7 million persons globally a year and no vaccine thus far been developed. With this discovery a vaccine is possible. As part of the team working on this project is Ms. Spadafora a member of Indicasat's staff and Mr. Jose Antonio Stoute who is a member of the Walter Reed Research Institute of the US Army and Penn State College of Medicine. This research took 5 years at a cost of approximately $500,000. (Note: Indicasat-AIP collaborates with Glaxo-SmithKline in two clinical trials for the development of vaccines for global infectious diseases).
Indicasat-AIP is also working on a project trying to find active properties in coconut plants which are active against diseases as well as developing hygiene products. Healing properties are attributed to coconut plants such as helping with insomnia and curing renal issues.
Another Panamanian scientist was recently awarded and international prize by the European Union and the City of Knowledge, Ms. Maribel Tribaldos de Suarez. Ms. Suarez was awarded the Europeaid prize. She is one of the youngest researchers in the Gorgas Commemorative Institute for Health Studies. Ms. Tribaldos is an epidemiologist and is one of the few researcher in Panama to study the genealogy of a person or family in terms of the racial distribution within the Panamanian population. Basically Ms. Tribaldos was trying to find out the racial make-up of the Panamanian Adam and Eve. Ms. Tribaldos traveled through all of the Panama's provinces and comarcas collecting 2,500 saliva samples which were sent to the US to be processed for DNA by the Sorensen Foundation. She discovered that Panama's Eve was an American Indian and Adam was an Eurasian male.
Ms. Tribaldos' interests are quite broad. She not only researches in the genetics field, she is also leading a study which will start next year focusing on molecular detection and follow-up of cancer in Panama. The idea is to find new techniques to diagnose cancer in Panama in order to facilitate the job of the National Cancer Institute.
There were 1,605 female researchers in Panama in 2007 and this number increased by 80 in 2008, and has continued to grow for 2009/10 which indicates that every day more Panamanian women are entering the research field and achieving great discoveries.
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