Ida Franiak-Pietryga

Ida Franiak-Pietryga has a strong academic background from leading institutions in Europe. She has over seventeen years of hands-on laboratory experience in biology, molecular biology and biophysics. She is trained in hematology, oncology and genetics, and has over ten years of experience in diagnostics of leukemia and cancer. She has conceived and led the research project entitled ‘Dendrimers – novel drugs for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)’. She has filed five patents covering the usage of glycodendrimers to cure CLL. The invention was awarded with a gold medal at the 112th International Invention Fair ‘Concours Lepine’ in 2013 in Paris. She is the author of numerous publications. She coordinated complex interdisciplinary studies carried out in various institutions and countries. She is the mentor, teacher, PhD and MS students supervisor and the reviewer of their thesis; a senior staff member (Head of Genetics Laboratory, responsible for onco-hematological genetic tests in 1000 patients/year) at The Copernicus Memorial Hospital (Lodz, Poland); Fulbright Scholar 2016-2017 at UC San Diego's Moores Cancer Center, where she is working on a new dendriplex based on PPI-G4 dendrimers and DeNAnos specific to triple negative breast cancer. She participated in the project on gene therapy-based nanoparticles drug delivery for Alzheimer’s disease, and in the EuroNanoMed project on nanoparticle-based vaccinations for HIV. Research partners were, for example: Karolinska Institute, Leibniz Polymer Institute, Riga Stradins University in Latvia and Medical School Cologne in Germany. Since 2017 she is working at the University of California, San Diego to develop drug delivery methods for the eye, and more recently on nanoparticle-based gene therapies for glaucoma. She is creative, hardworking and focused on translational research, highly organized with well-developed communication and a strong team spirit. She is fluent in English and Polish.