Yesterday, 23 November, at the CosmoCaixa Science Museum, the “la Caixa” Foundation held the ceremony to award grants to 33 projects in biomedicine and health that will be carried out at research centres, hospitals and universities in Spain and Portugal. One of the projects selected within the framework of the CaixaResearch call for Health Research projects 2023 -which aims to promote biomedical research of excellence with a major social impact in basic, clinical and translational research- was the research by the UPF researcher, Juana Díez. 

The project to find a new biological approach to curb the spread of infectious diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, led by the director of the Molecular Virology Research Group of the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences (MELIS) at UPF, has been endowed with 430,000 euros that will allow this research to be conducted over the next three years.

“Mosquito-borne viruses, such as dengue, Zika, chikungunya, and West Nile viruses, cause serious diseases that pose a threat to global health. And in recent decades, both the viruses and their vectors, mosquitoes, have spread to new geographical areas and have caused hundreds of millions of infections each year”, Díez explains. 

Mosquito-borne viruses, such as dengue, Zika, chikungunya, and West Nile viruses, have spread to new geographical areas and have caused hundreds of millions of infections each year

Thus, taking the chikungunya virus as a model, they will attempt to discover the mechanisms that allow viruses to multiply in mosquito cells in order to be able to develop new biological strategies to control their expansion. The team will analyse the factors that allow the high replication of the virus within the mosquito and will validate these findings in vivo to generate mosquitoes resistant to chikungunya infection.

The call, to which 493 proposals have been submitted this year, especially aims to address health challenges, such as infectious diseases (from which field eight projects have been chosen), neurosciences (7), cardiovascular and related metabolic diseases (7), and oncology (6). A further five initiatives have been awarded that will develop enabling technologies in one or more of these fields. On this occasion, a total of nine projects led by eight Catalan research centres have been awarded.