Ph.D. student since October 2014.
Main research topic: Enhancement of efficiency and shelf life of drugs.
Increasing stability of drugs is a highly sought after milestone for pharmaceutical researchers, since a more stable product comes along with longer shelf life. Once a drug has been stabilized, it becomes safer while its physical and chemical properties remain unaltered. However, to optimize a drug, increasing its stability is not the only goal to keep in mind, given that stability goes along with a decrease of its solubility, which is vital for drug assimilation in the body. Accordingly to the stability hierarchy, the best solubility of a substance is obtained in the glass state, i.e the unstable state. This situation presents then two competing effects that must be balanced in an optimal way by the use of biocompatible mechanisms, changing the original drug either by adding a component or by a physical process. My current studies are focused on finding such methods for different drugs and trying to refine them as much as possible. So far I have been applying experimental techniques such as High Pressure Dielectric Spectroscopy, High Pressure Differential Thermal Analysis, Differential Scanning Calorimetry, Thermogravimetry and Neutron Diffraction.
Previous research topic: Glass transitions in amorphous ices and cryopreservation.
I did my Licenciatura thesis as a joint project between Horacio Corti's group at Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina (http://www.qi.fcen.uba.ar/grupos/gvls/ ), and Thomas Loerting's group at Universität Innsbruck, Austria (http://homepage.uibk.ac.at/~c724117/). The subject of my thesis was ¨Amorphous ices. Glass transitions in LiCl aqueous solutions.¨ It was an experimental work carried out along a year in both laboratories by means of High Pressure techniques, Differential Scanning Calorimetry and X-Ray Diffraction.
At the same time, I have also worked in a cryopreservation project between Horacio Corti's group and the Biomembrane's Laboratory at the Medical Faculty from Universidad de Buenos Aires (http://www.fmed.uba.ar/depto/fisiologia/biomem/5.html). We studied how to improve the cryopreservation process of xenopus laevis oocytes.
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