GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH BY ELIZABETH VARGAS CASTELLANOS
Elizabeth Vargas Castellanos is a woman with a mission: to help improve access to medicine and treatment for underserved populations in Colombia. And she is getting results.
A MMEG grant in 2013 allowed Elizabeth to complete her Master’s degree in Biological Science with Honors at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota. In 2017, with the aid of a government grant, she began her PhD there. Her thesis, based on the mutational profile in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, revealed a unique mutation in the Afro-Colombian women of the San Andres Islands (Caribbean Sea), in contrast to those found in the other two Afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific coast. Researchers have concluded this mutation is a result of different colonization of the San Andres islands, which are 470 miles north of the Colombian mainland and were initially settled by the British and Dutch and enslaved Africans from Jamaica, before the arrivalof Spanish colonizers.
Elizabeth’s research has aided in the treatment and prevention of breast and ovarian cancers in Afro-Colombian women, who suffer from extremely poor healthcare availability. Geneticists are now able to follow up with families of these patients and perform closer preventive check-ups, as well as offer treatments or interventions.
Elizabeth’s PhD required an internship abroad, which she fulfilled by spending five months at the DKFZ German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. Elizabeth says she benefitted greatly from her work in Heidelberg, and she graduated magna cum laude for academic excellence in 2021.
Elizabeth began her career at the Faculty of Sciences at the Universidad del Rosario. She then moved from teaching to medical research. She was appointed coordinator of the molecular biology laboratory at the Caimed Medical Research and Care Center, an organization dedicated to clinical research, information, and knowledge management to generate health solutions. Elizabeth was in charge of building a highly bio-safe molecular biology laboratory for Caimed in Colombia. Ninety percent of Caimed’s employees are women, but Elizabeth was the only woman and one of only two employees with a doctorate.
As a complement to her breast and ovarian cancer research, Elizabeth has helped create a registry of BRCA1/2 variants in Colombian patients with breast and ovarian cancer, to identify mutations in the regional population and complement similar registries in other countries.
Elizabeth has a passion for teaching. Her long-term goal was to work at a large cancer research facility while teaching doctoral students, and she is well on her way. Elizabeth is now doing a post-doctorate at Colombia’s National Cancer Institute, researching prostate cancer in Colombian patients. This is only the beginning of what Elizabeth hopes to accomplish.
