Dr Gloria Gonzalez-Aseguinolaza, Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer of Vivet Therapeutics, has been awarded the Rosalind Franklin Society (RFS) Special Award in Science given by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. and the Rosalind Franklin Society.

The award recognises Dr Gonzalez-Aseguinolaza’s remarkable contributions and dedication to advancing scientific knowledge.

The RFS Special Award in science is awarded annually to recognise the contribution of women or under-represented minorities in science.

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was a British x-ray crystallographer whose extraordinary work, though largely overlooked and under-appreciated at the time, was crucial to the discovery of DNA’s structure by James Watson and Francis Crick.

Dr Gonzalez-Aseguinolaza said: “This is a tremendous honour, and I am very pleased that the RFS Society recognises my dedication and work in the field of gene therapy. Rosalind Franklin remains an inspiration to scientists around the world and I am delighted to be working with the team at Vivet to develop gene therapies with the potential to transform the lives of patients with inherited liver metabolic disorders.”

A career in gene therapy

Dr Gonzalez-Aseguinolaza began her career working on the development of gene-based vaccines against parasitic infections like malaria at the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas in Madrid, Spain, and the University of New York, USA.

She then moved into rare diseases and has been working on rare hepatic diseases for the last two decades, with a focus on the development of advanced therapies.

Since 2014, Dr Gonzalez-Aseguinolaza has been head of the Gene Therapy Program at the Centro Investigación Médica Aplicada (CIMA), Universidad de Navarra, in Spain.

From 2019 to 2023 she was the president of the Spanish Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (SETGyC) and is the current General Secretary of the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ESGCT).

Notably, Dr Gonzalez-Aseguinolaza coordinated the first ever gene therapy clinical trial utilising AAVs as a vector for the treatment of an inherited liver metabolic disease for acute intermittent porphyria.

Diana Spencer, Senior Digital Content Editor, DDW