Katerina Jirku-Pomajbikova - HFSP award

A  prestigious grant was awarded to a young scientist, Kateřina Jirků Pomajbíková, Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences in České Budějovice. In the following three years she is going to study the options for treating Crohn’s disease and other immunity diseases with gastrointestinal parasites.

1011 research teams from around the world applied for the grant in a demanding international competition organized by the Human Frontier Science Program in the category Young Investigators. The program is aimed at young researchers up to the age of 35 and is based in interdisciplinary and transnational cooperation. Only 31 of the teams were accepted. Kateřina Jirků Pomajbíková, together with her overseas colleague Laura Wegener-Parfrey, University of British Columbia, Canada, took a second place and was awarded a total of 750 thousand dollars (more than 19 million CZK) for their three-year project.

The aim of the project is to study non-pathogenic gastrointestinal parasites, that is to say, those that do not harm humans, and their influence on immune-mediated diseases. “We are going to study parasites we know are not pathogenic for humans and we are going to examine their influence on, for example, Crohn’s disease. We are going to find out, whether the state of health of people would improve if they were infected by these parasites, how the parasites influence the immune system and what their influence is on the composition of intestinal microflora“, Kateřina Jirků Pomajbíková explains. It is the composition of intestinal microflora that, as recently found, is one of the key factors for development of these intestinal inflammations and colitises.

The basis of the research is going to be a series of very demanding laboratory experiments that will be performed on rats. The major part of the experimental phase of the research will be performed in the laboratories of the Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre, where all the samples will be taken for immunological analyses and for microbiological analyses of intestinal microflora. These samples are going to be processed by the Canadian part of team.

Kateřina Jirků Pomajbíková, who leads the Laboratory of Parasitic Therapy, recently established by the Institute of Parasitology, has already been working on the research for two years. During that time she and her team determined which parasites were harmless and would be suitable candidates for further study. “We have identified one intestinal helminth and one protozoon,” reveals the parasitologist. Thanks to the recently obtained grant, her laboratory team will also grow as the young scientist plans to hire two postgraduate students within the first year.

http://www.hfsp.org/about-us/press-and-media-centre/news-items/2015-hfsp-awards-news