Koç University Faculty Members Won Dr. Nejat Eczacıbaşı Medical Awards

Assoc. Prof. Savaş Taşoğlu from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Assoc. Prof. Atay Vural from the School of Medicine received the Medical Incentive Award, while Prof. Tuğba Bağcı Önder and Asst. Prof. Gözde Korkmaz from the School of Medicine received the Scientific Research Support Award.

Assoc. Prof. Savaş Taşoğlu from the Department of Mechanical Engineering was awarded the Dr. Nejat Eczacıbaşı Medical Incentive Award for his work that contributed to the development of devices that can measure the reactions of various drugs to bioactive molecule combinations, diagnose diseases cost-effectively, and measure and analyze different health parameters in the long term.

Assoc. Prof. Atay Vural from the School of Medicine was awarded the Dr. Nejat Eczacıbaşı Medical Incentive Award for his work on translational neuroimmunology, which contributed to the diagnosis of thousands of patients by introducing MOG (a rare disease that can occur in the central nervous system) and neurofascin (a protein that plays an important role in the nervous system) antibody tests to Türkiye.

Prof. Tuğba Bağcı Önder from the School of Medicine received the Dr. Nejat Eczacıbaşı Medicine Scientific Research Support Award for her research on deciphering the relation between epigenetics (hereditary changes in gene expression without a change in DNA sequence) and cancer therapy response and the development of new treatment approaches.

Asst. Prof. Gözde Korkmaz from the School of Medicine was awarded the Dr. Nejat Eczacıbaşı Scientific Research Support Award on "Personalized Medicine" for her in vitro preclinical studies to test the effectiveness of RHEB (a protein that plays an important role in many biological processes such as cell growth, cellular signal transduction and protein synthesis) inhibition in the treatment of ERα-positive breast cancer patients, to determine to what extent it works in resistant/sensitive cells (ARID1A-Mutant/ARID1A-WT), how it shows synergy with existing clinical drugs and its mechanisms of action.