Ivana Víšová from the Optics Division has won the second place in the prestigious Werner von Siemens Award for her dissertation thesis “The study on interactions of functional surfaces with biological systems”. She has received two other prizes for it: the Bolzano Award awarded by Charles University, and the Visegrád Group Academies Young Researcher Award. In spite of her success in physics, her journey to it wasn’t completely straight; she wanted to become an Egyptologist, and Egypt has remained her grand passion until today.
The focus of her dissertation, supervised by Hana Lísalová from the Institute of Physics, was on the research of non-specific interactions of biomolecules with functional surfaces. In her thesis, she was mostly concerned with the development and characterisation of what is known as polymer brush coatings.
They can prevent a non-specific binding and, at the same time, can be tuned to perform an additional function. This can be achieved by binding to them a specific pathogen antidote. There, on the anti-fouling surface, a platform is created to selectively capture a specific virus, bacteria or toxin, without interacting with any other particle.
“Hanka Lísalová was working on this topic already as a postdoc, so I just joined her in her efforts. I mainly focused on the development of new copolymer brushes, and their applications such as on the development of biosensors and surfaces for dealing with cells and the improvement of the surface functionalization process,” Ivana Víšová said about the role she played in the research.
The key role in her thesis was played by the functionalization process. In it, the polymer brush coating gets chemically activated so that it can bind a carrier for a desired function (such as the aforementioned antidote). “It was assumed that a surface that is activated in such a way gets gradually deactivated over time, and returns to its original anti-fouling condition. We demonstrated that this assumption is false, and proposed several solutions,” Ivana Víšová said, describing one of the problems that she and her colleagues from the Functional Biointerfaces Laboratory were posed with.
The team has published several articles about the problem and has proposed deactivation chemical reactions to restore the anti-fouling properties on the surface, and, simultaneously, devised new copolymer structures to overcome the same problem in a different way. Instead of having to deactivate a large number of active centres, the new structures allow, right from the start, that only a very limited number of active locations will emerge. The subsequent loss of the anti-fouling properties is not so important because most of the surface doesn’t get activated at all.
The basic research has allowed Ivana Víšová to gradually arrive at various applications such as developing biosensors and biochips for detecting bacteria in food; detecting viruses from swabs and bodily samples but also for detecting microRNA. In the last 10 years, microRNA has shown a lot of promise as a prospective marker of different oncological and other – congenital or acquired diseases. In the future MicroRNA might allow a disease to be diagnosed before it manifests itself.
Ivana Víšová participated in the development of surfaces for studying cell stress, and joined a research project focusing on bacteria-bacteriophage interactions. This project shows a lot of potential in overcoming the problem of increasingly higher bacterial resistance to antibiotic treatment. A significant milestone was reached by Ivana Víšová, and Hana Lísalová’s team during the COVID-19 pandemic.
They developed a special biochip to diagnose Covid-19 in cooperation with the Biological Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of South-Bohemia in České Budějovice. “Perhaps, it was the wide scope of the work that got me the Werner von Siemens Award. The committee appreciated its multidisciplinary approach and the wide-ranging scope
Ivana Víšová and Hana Lísalová applied for the Werner von Siemens Award at the instigation of professor Vladimír Baumruk from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University, who was the chairman of the dissertation committee. “After the dissertation defence was over, he praised the work, saying it would be good for us to apply both for the Werner von Siemens Award, and the Bolzano Award, because we had a good chance of winning. Hanka Lísalová also agreed.
And as the thesis had already been done, all we had to do was to submit it. Eventually, we won a prize indeed,” Ivana Víšová, said, still pleasantly surprised at winning the second place, highlighting Hana Lísalová’s role in her research career. “It was Hanka who introduced me to the topic. She is a very inspirational person who knows how to get you interested in almost anything. She has got a lot of ideas and enthusiasm she is able to convey to her team. I guess that if I had worked with another supervisor, I wouldn’t have achieved such results. It’s mostly her achievement; she keeps searching for challenges and opportunities.”
“Ivana has shown a great talent for science, and incredible problem-solving skills when dealing with the challenges the team was faced with during the research. Her research career is still at the beginning, and I believe this award will help her boost her career. I am going keep my fingers crossed for her future,“ Hana Lísalová, the supervisor of the thesis, said.
Ivana Víšová is now preparing for a postdoc role in which she would like to pay a visit to other areas of biophysics than biosensors. “I am in touch with a research group in Vienna. They are quite a small and young group, but they are ambitious and plan on doing large projects. It’s high-risk/ high-return. I like them very much. They go ahead with their research, fearing nothing,” the young researcher said, adding that she might employ some of her physical methods to her beloved egyptology one day.