Bio
Maria Lucrecia Alvarez, PhD, is a postdoctoral research associate in the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, working on the development of transgenic plants intended for therapeutic and industrial applications.
Alvarez came to the United States in 2002 to work for Amanda Walmsley, PhD, at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., as a visiting research scholar partially supported by Argentina’s Fundación Antorchas.
In 2003, Alvarez began her current position in a laboratory run by Guy Cardineau, PhD. Here, she is developing an oral plant-made vaccine in tomato targeted against pneumonic and bubonic plague. Other areas of interest include reversion of gene silencing as a strategy to recover the expression of transgenic proteins in plants that are transformed with many copies of a transgene but have lost expression, presumably due to RNA silencing.
As a part of a collaborative project with the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, Alvarez and Cardineau also are developing transgenic alfalfa expressing hG-CSF (human granulocyte colony stimulator factor) that could be used as a treatment in patients with leukemia and anemia as well as to counteract some of the negative side effects of the chemotherapy.
Alvarez earned a master’s degree in biochemistry and a doctorate in molecular biology from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina. Her doctoral dissertation, "Improvement of Nutritional and Bread-making Quality of Wheat by Genetic Engineering," reflects her training in the UK and Spain.
In 1996, at the Institute of Arable Crops Research (IACR), Long Ashton Research Station at Bristol University in the UK, Alvarez received training supported by British Council and Fundación Antorchas. And, in 2000, Alvarez studied the particular rheological properties of the dough made with flours from the transgenic wheat, as a research scholar at the Department of Genetics and Plant Improvement, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain.