Congratulations are in order to our Deputy Head of Department Professor of Cell Biology Manuela Zaccolo on being awarded the 2023 Ketty Schwartz Award by the International Society for Heart Research European Section. She will receive €1,000 and deliver the award lecture titled 'cAMP nanodomain signalling' at the next ISHR-ES Annual meeting on Thursday 13 July 2023. The award follows a series of achievements this year, having become an Elected Member of Academia Europaea in May and elected Fellow of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in April.
The award honours Professor Zaccolo's contribution to unravelling the intricate dynamics of cyclic nucleotide signalling, with a particular focus on the cardiac myocyte. In particular, she developed the first genetically encoded fluorescent probes for cAMP detection in living cells, which provided direct evidence of nanodomain cAMP signalling and shed light on the crucial role of phosphodiesterases in cAMP compartmentalisation. Furthermore, the Zaccolo lab's research has advanced our understanding of how second messengers achieve hormonal specificity through subcellular compartmentalization and nanodomain signaling, and in doing so has fundamentally changed the way we study intracellular signaling and how we target it for therapeutic purposes.
The award is named after the late Ketty Schwartz, former CNRS Director of Research in Paris, and pioneer of molecular cardiology. Notably, Her research led to the development of molecular genetics in cardiology in the early 1990s with the identification of gene defects in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, long QT syndrome, and muscular dystrophy.