The Werner von Siemens Award is an annual competition that the Siemens company has run for 26 years, recognising the authors of the best student, graduate and scientific papers as well as university teachers. The competition focuses on engineering and natural science including IT and medicine and its ultimate goal is to support the development of Czech higher education, science and research.
Dáša Bohačiaková received the Siemens CEO´s Special Award for Excellence in Women´s Scientific Work. Her research focuses on Alzheimer´s disease and involves cerebral organoids.
Cerebral organoids are small clusters of cells consisting of pluripotent stem cells that resemble the human brain in their structure and cell composition. “We are able to create these mini-brains, roughly the size of a pinhead, in laboratory conditions from healthy stem cells and also from the cells of patient´s who are suffering from Alzheimer´s disease,” says the award winner and biologist Dáša Bohačiaková.
Mini brains and Alzheimer´s
The researchers can compare the cerebral organoids and describe any differences between them. When it comes to mini brains created from the cells of Alzheimer´s patients, scientists can even observe the clusters of proteins that are found in the brains of the patients and are thought to be one of ways the disease causes dementia.
“Thanks to this, we can theoretically look at a Petri dish and analyse whether certain substances can slow down or even stop the progress of the disease,” says Bohačiaková, who embarked upon this line of research thanks to her experience with stem cells and her collaboration with other research groups studying Alzheimer´s disease at Masaryk University and abroad.
The organoids were first created because researchers needed appropriate cell models for their work that would allow them to observe the development of the disease and test the effects of various substances.
Dáša Bohačiaková views the Werner von Siemens competition as a prestigious scientific award and is very happy and grateful that she was selected as the winner of this year´s competition. “I have to add that this would not be possible without the tremendous work of my team in the lab. So, I see this as an award for the whole research team,” she says. Bohačiaková hopes that the award may also introduce the research group to a community of scientists and people with whom it could potentially collaborate.
“Personally, I think it is a great success that I currently have a great team of people who get on well with each other, who make sure that all our experiments and projects are running smoothly and who keep discovering new and interesting things and learning to work with new technologies. I hope we can continue like this for a long time to come,” says Bohačiaková.
In her opinion, her team´s greatest scientific success so far is the fact that the cellular brain models created by the team really imitate the course of diseases in vitro, i.e. in laboratory conditions, and can therefore be used to study the causes of Alzheimer´s and other diseases.
Dáša Bohačiaková graduted from the Molecular Biology and Genetics programme at the Faculty of Science at MU before completing her PhD in Medical Biology at the MU Faculty of Medicine and spending three years as a postdoc at the University of California, San Diego. Upon her return, she joined the Department of Histology and Embryology at the Faculty of Medicine, where she now leads her own research group.
Take a look at the portrait of Dáša Bohačiaková's work created for the Werner von Siemens Award competition.
Support for women and young scientists
Four years ago, Bohačiaková return to her research career after taking a partial break so she could go on parental leave. At that time, she received one of the first Career Restart grants, which are awarded by the MU´s internal Grant Agency to support promising researchers who took a longer break from their career. “The financial support from MU was vital, because balancing a career and a family with very young children required the involvement of other people who took care of our children when we were working,” says Bohačiaková about the benefits of the Career Restart grant. In subsequent years, two of her colleagues were also awarded the grant and she is glad that they were able to rejoin her team sooner thanks to the support from the university.
And what kind of help would she appreciate right now? Any reduction in the administrative burden. “In particular, filling out monthly timesheets for some grants is really a waste of everyone´s time. Right now, we are working on grant applications and annual reports, where information gets repeated all the time. I personally find it very frustrating to have to repeatedly fill in the same data and rationale in a bunch of spreadsheets, especially when everything is going according to plan,” says Bohačiaková, pointing out a long-standing sore spot in Czech research.
She adds that it would also be great if Masaryk University regularly offered opportunities to receive internal grants, for example to improve cooperation between individual university departments. “A grant for PhD students would also be great, so they could experience, in real life, how to apply for a grant and how to manage it.”