Mariana Waghabi

Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ)

In 2008, I joined the Fiocruz research team through a public competition and currently I am a full-time researcher at the Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics Laboratory, at the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz/ Fiocruz. In 2014 I started to lead a research project based on the laboratory's expertise in biotechnological innovation, which aims to search for new methods of diagnosis and therapy for cancer using aptamers. The main objective of the proposal is to increase the specificity of cancer therapy by avoiding the serious side effects that still exist and to improve the diagnosis of cancer in terms of specificity and time. This process has an innovative character and contributes to technological development in Brazil. Over the years, I guided 14 postgraduate students (including masters and PhD), six of them on topics related to this Project. Moreover, we have implemented the aptamer selection technology in our research Institute, created 4 aptamers banks with tumor cell specificity and obtained approval in the patent viability process carried out at Fiocruz as a first step to obtain patents for the identified aptamer sequences.

Appearances