“When I was little, I loved arts and crafts, creating things. I still do. With Luc Brunsveld’s research group at the Eindhoven University of Technology we ‘built’ molecules that could glue together two specific proteins. Gluing the estrogen receptor to a protein known as 14-3-3 ensures that this receptor becomes less effective. That’s important because we know that the estrogen receptor plays a big part in the development of breast cancer. This is a new way of medicine development in which we use and expand on existing processes from nature. This has only been possible thanks to my collaboration with Wilbert Zwart’s research group at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. Thanks to this collaboration, I was able to join chemical biological knowledge from Eindhoven and cell biological knowledge from Amsterdam. Both branches can reinforce one another. Just like clouds that result from evaporation and condensation, as you can see on the cover of my thesis, we need the exchange from both groups to reach a full understanding of the mechanism behind our glue.”
Emira will defend her thesis on June 27.
This research was financially supported by Oncode and the Dutch Research Council (NWO)
prof. dr. ir. L. Brunsveld
prof. dr. W.T. Zwart