Houria
Boulaiz

Houria Boulaiz Tassi is a Full professor at the Department of Human Anatomy and Embryology, School of Medicine and member of the Institute of Biopathology and Regenerative Medicine, University of Granada, Spain. She is also a member of the Biosanitary Research Institute of Granada (ibs.GRANADA). She got her Ph.D. in 2002 in this university working on suicide gene therapy applied to cancer and received the 2006 PhD Excellence award for her dissertation. She is a Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of Medicine and Surgery of Granada District since 2002. She received 7 research awards, among them the Award of the Social Council of the University of Granada to the “Best Investigating Trajectory of Young Researchers” (2009).

 

The main areas of Pr. Boulaiz activity coincide with the line of research "Translational Research and Personalized Medicine" reflected in the doctoral program "Biomedicine" with mention to excellence, in which she participated as part of the teaching and research team. The main focus is the study of the processes of differentiation and the normal and pathological development of the disease, using valid experimental models such as normal and tumour human cell lines, stem cells obtained from patients and experimental models in vivo (athymic mice, Balb-c etc. ..). Her researches not only focus on the basic aspects but are also clearly translational and multidisciplinary. They seek alternatives for diagnostic application and therapeutic use to benefit the health of patients with high prevalence diseases, such as degenerative diseases and cancer. In the field of experimental oncology, she has implemented different therapeutic strategies directed against cancer stem cells (CSCs), based on novel natural and synthetic drugs, gene therapy, nanotechnology and combinations of all of them. From the field of diagnosis, her research group has made a great advance in the identification of new biomarkers with a prognostic and predictive value of response to cancer treatment and have developed an integrated non-invasive, highly sensitive and selective platform based on the use of bioinformatics and nanotechnology. 

 

Pr. Boulaiz teaches Human Anatomy at the undergraduate level. She also participates at post-graduate level in different Master’s degrees (“Translational Research and Personalized Medicine”, “Biotechnology and Biomedicine etc…). She has been the supervisor of 6 Ph.D. students (of which 5 internationals) and she is currently supervising 2 more students. She has participated in more than 30 public research projects and contracts, established with private companies (being the principal investigator of 3), and published more than 69 articles in international refereed journals, 5 books, 10 book chapters. She is the inventor of 7 patents, one of these (P 201300753) has been licensed to the company VIDIA HEALTH S.A.