Patrícia with her academic supervisor of Prof Gianluca Ciardelli, Polytechnic of Turin( left) and her Clinical supervisor Dr Med. Jochen Salber. University Hospital of the Ruhr-University Bochum (right).
Congratulation to Patrícia Varela, who defended her PhD thesis, ‘Antibacterial strategies to tackle wound infections’, at the Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy on 16 July 2019.
Patrícia’s research was based at the polytechnic and in the laboratory of Dr Med. Jochen Salber at the University Hospital of the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany and had two focuses:
- investigating the antimicrobial and immunomodulation properties of clinically-applied silver biomaterials
(Varela, P., Sartori, S., Viebahn, R., Salber, J. & Ciardelli, G. (2019) ‘Macrophage immunomodulation: An indispensable tool to evaluate the performance of wound dressing biomaterials’ Journal of Applied Biomaterials & Functional Materials DOI: 10.1177/2280800019830355)
- extensively exploring a new antibiotic-free antibacterial polymer ‘antimicrobial-peptide mimetic polyurethane’ which showed rapid bactericidal capacity, prevented biofilm formation against drug-sensitive and -resistant pathogenic bacteria and presented a cytocompatibility outcome. Moreover, she proved that this polyurethane is a bacterial membrane-active agent like most of antimicrobial peptides.
(Idrees, A*., Varela, P.*, Ruini, F.*, Vasquez, J.*, Salber, J., Greiser, U., Wang, W., McMahon, S., Sartori, S., Ciardelli, G. & Chiono, V. (2018) ‘Drug-free antibacterial polymers for biomedical applications’ Biomedical Science and Engineering DOI: 10.4081/bse.2018.39 *authors contributed equally)
Further Research articles are under preparation and will be published in the near future.
Patrícia is the fourth HyMedPoly Early Stage Researcher to successfully defend their thesis and we wish her success in her future career.