The PhD student, Anna Vázquez-Oliver, has won the first call of the predoctoral fellowship promoted by the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation to promote research in Down syndrome. Vázquez-Oliver, who is studying the PhD programme in Biomedicine at UPF, will develop her thesis at the Neuropharmacology Laboratory of the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (DCEXS) of UPF and will be supervised by the principal researcher, Andrés Ozaita.

The thesis project, entitled Preclinical approaches in the treatment of Down syndrome, will study the possible treatment of Down syndrome by modulating drugs of the endocannabinoid system. “The team, led by Andrés Ozaita, has performed advances in the use of the endocannabinoid system as a target in the treatment of intellectual disability”, says the pre-doctoral student. “In this project, we hope to obtain data to understand the cognitive improvements in the experimental models of Down syndrome”.

The main objective of the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation is to promote medical research on genetic and intellectual diseases, with special emphasis on the trisomy of chromosome 21 or Down syndrome. In this line, the Foundation has instituted the Jérôme Lejeune predoctoral fellowship, which consists of a grant during the four years of the doctoral thesis.