Helmholtz Doctoral Award for Mariam Amghar
In her doctoral thesis at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Mariam Amghar investigated why some prostate cancer patients respond to radioactive drugs while others do not. Her findings may help tailor treatment more effectively to individual patients in the future.
Mariam Amghar has been awarded the Helmholtz Doctoral Prize in the “Health” category. At the DKFZ, she conducted research on tumor DNA circulating in the blood and genetic alterations in prostate tumors, which she linked to clinical parameters such as tumor markers and treatment outcomes. Her goal is to predict and explain why a specific radionuclide therapy, the so-called PSMA-targeted radionuclide therapy, for advanced prostate cancer is effective in some patients but not in others. The goal is to better adapt treatment to each individual patient.
The treatments evaluated in this study are based on a radiopharmaceutical for which the scientific foundations were laid at DKFZ, and which has since become widely used in clinical practice. Patients with metastatic, hormone-resistant prostate cancer can benefit from these therapies. Nuclear medicine physicians administer radioactive agents that bind specifically to cancer cells or are taken up by them, irradiating and killing the cells.
“Mariam’s findings could help find ways to identify those patients who benefit most from the therapy and enable earlier detection of treatment resistance,” says Martina Benesova-Schäfer, who supervised Mariam Amghar as a doctoral student at the DKFZ.
The Helmholtz Association is honoring this outstanding achievement with one of this year’s doctoral awards. Each year, the Association presents these awards in each of its six research areas to early-career researchers who have completed their doctoral studies at a Helmholtz Center with outstanding results. The Helmholtz Doctoral Awards come with a cash prize of 5,000 euros. In addition, there is a lump-sum allowance for travel and other expenses for a research stay abroad of up to 12,000 euros.
Mariam Amghar studied Pharmaceutical and Medical Biotechnology at the Universities of Florence and Padua in Italy. After conducting research at the University of Bern and the Institute of Virology and Immunology in Bern, Switzerland, she earned her Ph.D. at the DKFZ. Mariam Amghar is currently conducting research as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA, and as a postdoctoral affiliate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
