At the webinar of 27 May, the chair of the Medicinal Chemistry & Chemical Biology section announced the winner of the MCCB PhD Thesis Award: Dr Natalia Ortiz-Zacarias. The jury found her research to be original, multidisciplinary and ground-breaking.

Were you surprised to win the prize?

‘Yes! I must admit that I was very surprised, since I didn’t even know I was nominated. So when I heard that I won, I was very happy to hear it.’

What was so special or interesting about your thesis that you received a prize for it?

‘During my PhD, we studied novel concepts to target chemokine receptors (CCRs), you could call that the main topic of my thesis. The main concept was insurmountable antagonism. It’s quite a mouthful! But basically we wanted to create antagonists that could inhibit CCRs, even though there’s a high concentration of active chemokines. The antagonists could then counteract the effects of chemokines during a disease.