This award aims to recognise the career of an internationally renowned senior Spanish researcher based in the UK who has been instrumental to the advance of science, research, and innovation.
Prof Galán is interested in synthetic organic chemistry and develops synthetic tools for biological and biomedical applications. Her lab designs and develops glycan-based fluorescent nano probes as a powerful tool to screen for carbohydrate-mediated interactions and exploit those for therapeutic and diagnostic applications in cancer, antimicrobials and plants. The development of selective and potent anticancer therapeutics is one of the biggest challenges in the area of cancer research. G-quadruplexes are four-stranded guanine rich secondary DNA structures, which are over-represented in gene promoter regions including oncogenes and tumour suppressors. She and her team also aim to develop ligands able to stabilised selective G-quadruplex structures as novel anti-cancer therapeutics.
Carmen is one of the co-investigators on a Cancer Research UK project looking to develop a blood test that could identify brain tumours earlier in the diagnostic pathway.