HUN-REN Szegedi Biológiai Kutatóközpont 
2025. okt. 10. | News
The L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Programme was established in 1998 with the aim of support the advancement of young female researchers in their scientific careers. PhD students, postdoctoral fellows and research physicians are eligible to apply for the award.
This year’s L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science honours in Hungary have been awarded to Julianna Olah, from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Orsolya Anna Pipek, from the Eötvös Loránd University, and Ana Martins from the Biophysics Institute of the HUN-REN Biological Research Centre, Szeged (HUN-REN BRC Szeged). Ana’s research has been focused on resistance to therapeutic drugs, since the early years as a PhD student. In her first post-doctoral project, at the University of Szeged, Pharmacognosy Institute led by Judit Hohmann, she investigated ways to overcome resistance in cancer. Soon her interest turned to exploring trade-off mechanisms of resistance and she studied collateral sensitivity of resistant cancer cell lines to new drugs, as well as combinations of new drugs with in-use anticancer agents. In particular, she was interested in studying natural compounds and their derivates, with special focus on ecdysteroids for their activity as modulators of multi-drug resistance (Martins A, et al. (2012) J Med Chem 55 (11): 5034–5043).
After starting her second post-doc period at the Lendület Laboratory of Microbial Experimental Evolution at the HUN-REN BRC Szeged, led by Csaba Pál, in 2015, she had the opportunity to continue this line of work on bacterial pathogens in a high-throughput manner. She focused not only on exploring collateral sensitivity and cross-resistance profiles of resistant bacteria to antimicrobial peptides, but also on how those characteristics could be exploited for efficient drug combinations that could prevent evolution of resistance to the treatment (Lázár, V.*, Martins, A.*, et al. (2018) Nature Microbiology 3, 718–731 (*shared first author).
After two years of maternity leave, she re-joined the lab by the end of 2020 and focused her research on understanding mechanisms of resistance evolution of gram-positive bacteria to new antimicrobials and identifying targets that can be explored to develop new antibacterial compounds and prevent evolution of resistance during clinical treatment. In this work she and her colleagues found that, under lab conditions, Staphylococcus aureus readily evolved resistance to multiple antibiotics, either currently in development or recently clinically approved. They observed that many resistance mutations are already present in natural bacterial populations, namely in clinical isolates resistant to antibiotics currently used in clinical practice. Their findings highlight the importance of examining the propensity of pathogens to evolve resistance to antibiotic candidates at an early stage of antibiotic research and provide a systematic pathway for its assessment (Martins A*$, Judák F*, Farkas Z*, et al. (2025) Science Translational Medicine, 17,eadl2103).
After her second maternity leave, in January 2025, she joined the Nanobiosensorics Research Group led by Róbert Horváth at the Institute of Biophysics of the HUN-REN BRC Szeged. In close collaboration with the group of Mária Deli, the new research topics involve the study of biological barriers. Her objective is to bring together the knowhow of the current lab and her previous research experience in drug resistance into new research projects. Her area of research is the study of ecdysteroids’ effects on the central nervous system, especially to understand the mechanisms by which they protect the blood brain barrier in pathological conditions. In this project, she and her colleagues plan to characterize the pharmacological properties of ecdysteroid conjugates, focusing on blood brain barrier protection, with the goal to use these compounds to prevent disease development or slow down disease progression. In the end of this project, they aim to identify an efficient and economically viable compound that can be used by persons with high risk to develop neurodegenerative diseases, for example those with type 2 diabetes or other metabolic diseases, in order to preserve blood brain barrier integrity.
Huge congratulations!