What else could we start with but to congratulate our young and successful colleague Susanne Prokop (KOKI) on her latest success, the Junior Prima Prize in Science, the most prestigious Hungarian award for researchers under 33 years of age!
Susanne, who already came to KOKI with an excellent track record and a collection of awards, including the well-deserved Kuffler Scholarship, and when she joined the team led by István Katona chose an excellent place in terms of several aspects and the best possible chances of winning the Junior Prima Prize. (She is the third awardee from this group and they are all female.)
Susanne succeeded in developing a new method called PharmacoSTORM, which allows the measurement of the binding site of drugs on the surface of nerve cells with nanometre precision. This method was the first to determine the mechanism of action of a drug of industrial history, Cariprazine, a Hungarian drug of historic importance.
The results of a five-year series of experiments led by István Katona and György Keserű, a member of Hung Acad Sci, and leader of the Medicinal Chemistry Group (HUN-REN TTK) were published in Nature Communications in 2021.
Susanne’s presentation of the PharmacoSTORM method won her the Best Young Investigator Presentation Award at the ERNEST 6th conference, a forum for signal transduction research.
One more significant fact: The use of PharmacoSTORM and Susanne’s observation has drawn attention to a little-known and little-researched brain area, the Calleja Islands, and has led to the start of studies on its role in the human brain and psychiatric diseases.
It is also a “special prize” that the study has been selected as one of the top five basic research findings of 2021 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the NIH in the US.
The latest award is the Junior Prima Prize.
CONGRATULATION and just go on!