Nordic Life Science 1
P HAR MA C O V I G I L AN C E FACTS MANAV’S PROJE
CT scientists when it comes to networking and funding. That is why I would like to contribute to the Danish research environment and develop my life and career here in Denmark. For a postdoc, having your own funding is an amazing thing. Having huge funding, such as the NNF funding, is a blessing for me because it is very, very convenient and it helps me come back to Denmark, which is just perfect for me. For my research career I am very certain that this postdoc will improve my skills tremendously. I will be working with very brilliant people who contribute to the area amazingly and some of whom are Nobel Laureates. Being in such a work environment will help me become an independent and good scientist.” Where will you conduct your postdoc? “I will be working at the Medical Research Council – Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB) in Cambridge, England, with the group of Lori Passmore.” What applications could your research have? ANNA-LEENA SAARELA IS today working as a Pharmacovigilance Expert at Crown CRO, a Finnish CRO with offices in the Nordic and Baltic area and with operations mainly in Europe. She is a part of a team of pharmacovigilance experts and her respons-ibilities cover a wide range of tasks, from overall maintenance and development of the company’s pharmacovigilance (PV) system, to management and coordination of PV projects and tasks, and daily PV operations, such as safety case processing. “In this role, no day is the same as the previous one,” she says. science? “My research focuses on RNA processing. This is directly related to health diseases, bone marrow diseases and gene expression. If we can control this process, we can control which genes are expressed. This means that if we know a specific gene is causing a specific disease, we can just stop that gene from being translated from the very beginning.” What is the best thing about being a scientist and about your area of research? “The best thing is the idea of helping people! What we do is very baseline scientific research, which paves the way for the clinical researchers to develop treatments for diseases such as infections, heart failure etc. Knowing that I might be helping humanity feels amazing and it is the driving force for me to just keep working and learning.” Do you have any advice for students out there wanting to pursue a career in T E X T b y MA L I N O T MAN I “It might feel overwhelming and tiring. Their lab work will not always yield good results. Most of the time we get negative results, but we never give up. Always look for a reason and look for a different way of doing it. There is always a way of getting the results, it’s just a matter of hard work and reading what other people are doing. And always discuss your studies with other people, see what they think about it. Science is fun!” NLS FOUND my CALLING Nordisk Foundation’s postdoctoral fellowships 2019 for research abroad in the field of Bioscience and Basic Biomedicine. Cemre Manav will receive DKK 3,998,207 over four years. What does this grant mean to you and your research? “I have been studying and working as a researcher in Aarhus/ Copenhagen for the last six years. I have always appreciated the work ethics here in Denmark. There are also so many good opportunities for I HAVE was one of the recipients of the Novo TITLE: Cryo-electron microscopy and functional studies of targeted deadenylation complex: Insights into mRNA deadenylation at the molecular level Anna-Leena Saarela is an expert in pharmacovigilance and she sees it as a privilege to work in the front line of this fast developing environment for the benefit of patient safety. “A typical day at work varies depending on the stage of the projects Crown CRO PV are working on at the time. Right now I am involved in developing new Standard Operating Procedures in close collaboration with our Quality Assurance department, while at the same time planning a controlled change to our electronic safety database, Argus Safety, with the system vendor.” mRNA turnover is a fundamental aspect of gene regulation. In the nucleus, eukaryotic mRNAs are polyadenylated at the 3’-end [poly(A) tail] and the poly(A) tail is crucial for gene regulation. In the cytoplasm, mRNAs are de-adenylated, where the length of the poly(A) tail is gradually shortened. After the poly(A) tail is removed, the mRNA is degraded, which makes deadenylation a critical step in determining the lifetime of mRNAs. The tail is protected by Pab1 and shortened by Ccr4-Not. This process is further regulated by the RNA-binding protein tristetraprolin, promoting targeted deadenylation. Understanding how these proteins work in such a large assembly will reveal in greater detail how mRNAs are regulated through their 3′-end. This will lay the groundwork for the treatment of many diseases, such as heart failure, as well as for therapeutic processes, for example gene silencing. A clinical trial in the start-up phase is also keeping Saarela busy as she and her colleagues are setting up the NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG 69