The 2014 Young Investigator Oscar is Awarded to Marta Benet and Mariona Pinart

Researchers Marta Benet and Mariona Pinart have been awarded the 2014 Young Investigator Oscar for authoring a study that belongs to the select top 1% of most cited papers in the world, among those published in 2014. The prize, given by the ‘Agència de Qualitat i Avaluació Sanitàries de Catalunya’ (AQuAS) is symbolic and recognizes work done in Catalonia in the field of biomedical research.

The publication that earned them the award is Comorbidity of eczema, rhinitis, and asthma in IgE-sensitised and non-IgE-sensitised children in MeDALL: a population-based cohort study published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. The study was performed in the framework of the Mechanisms of the Development of ALLergy (MeDALL) project, co-coordinated by the current ISGlobal scientific director Josep M. Antó and funded by the FP7 programme of the European Union, with the aim of generating novel knowledge on the mechanisms of initiation and development of allergies.

The prize was awarded during the ‘Results and Impact on Health Research’ (Jornada de Resultats i Impacte de la Recerca en Salut) event that took place on June 28th at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the University of Barcelona.

ISGlobal statistician Marta Benet, who collected the prize, recalled the collective effort that allowed collecting data from 14 European cohorts and underlined the relevance of the award-winning publication: “The results of this study show that coexistence of eczema, rhinits, and asthma in the same child is more common than expected by chance alone, this finding would support the hypothesis that the three entities are in fact the same disease with different clinical manifestations.”

Reference

Pinart, M., Benet, M. et al. Comorbidity of eczema, rhinitis, and asthma in IgE-sensitised and non-IgE-sensitised children in MeDALL: a population-based cohort study. Lancet Respir Med. 2014 Feb;2(2):131-40. doi: 10.1016/S2213-2600(13)70277-7. Epub 2014 Jan 14.