Elisabet Tintó-Font Receives the Ramón Margalef Prize from the University of Barcelona

ISGlobal researcher Elisabet Tintó-Font has received the Ramon Margalef Prize at the twentieth edition of the University of Barcelona’s Board of Trustees Awards. The prize honours the best research article in the field of experimental and health sciences published as part of a doctoral thesis.

Tintó-Font's work, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, describes how the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum adapts to adverse conditions in the host, such as high temperatures during fever, solving a key question in the parasite’s biology.

Research that addresses key questions

The prize-winning study focuses on how malaria parasites that lack the HSF1 transcription factor, which is typical of other eukaryotic organisms, manage to survive the high temperatures associated with fever. Tintó-Font and his thesis supervisor, Alfred Cortés, showed that the PfAP2-HS gene is responsible for regulating this response to ‘heat shock’. The findings have significant implications: parasites lacking PfAP2-HS are not only more vulnerable to feverish temperatures but also more sensitive to the antimalarial drug artemisinin.

Elisabet Tintó-Font has a degree in biomedicine and a master's degree in advanced microbiology. In 2019, she obtained her PhD in Biomedicine in the laboratory of Alfred Cortés at ISGlobal, where she continues to work as a Research Assistant. Her research interests include the epigenetic regulation of the malaria parasite’s sexual conversion and its heat shock response mechanisms.

The award ceremony took place on 3 December in the Aula Magna of the UB's historic building. Other prizes were also awarded, such as the José Manuel Blecua Prize, for a publication on the perception of safety in urban parks, and the Antoni Caparrós Prize, which recognised advances in the teaching of history and the treatment of histamine intolerance.