Women are key to drug development: Lena Ruiz

Eirinet Gómez

La Jornada Newspaper, Wednesday, April 30, 2025, p. 6

Women have played a key role in the creation of remedies and health care since ancient times, but their importance in drug development has historically been minimized, said Lena Ruiz Azuara, 2021 National Prize in Sciences and Arts winner.

During the conference "Challenges in Drug Development," organized by the Women's Museum, she mentioned the case of Letitia Mumford Geer, an American inventor who designed the one-handed hypodermic syringe in 1896.

It's a tool that changed the way medical treatments are delivered, but it hasn't received enough recognition; very little is known about it , he noted.

Another case is Rosalind Elsie Franklin, whose work on X-ray diffraction led to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. She died in 1958 without receiving the Nobel Prize, and her work was not mentioned when Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the award in 1962.

It's very difficult to develop a drug, but it's even more difficult when the team is made up of and led by women. Our credibility remains the same as when Mumford Geer tried to patent the one-handed hypodermic needle. There's reluctance when it comes from women.

In her participation, Graciela Aguilera Suárez, Director of Research at Farmacéuticos Rayere, agreed with Ruiz Azuara that the challenges for women in the pharmaceutical industry have to do with gender bias.

Being a woman is a difficulty , she stated, and recalled that the first time she proposed to her company to venture into research, there were people who showed many doubts, perhaps not executives, but certainly among colleagues .

Both specialists agreed on the need to take action to strengthen the industry and increase the female presence.

Ruiz Azuara, a specialist in compounds with biomedical applications in the fight against cancer, believes the sector's challenges include establishing a solid group of drug designers (molecular biologists, pharmacologists, geneticists, and general practitioners), fostering relationships among Mexican pharmaceutical companies, and establishing ties with the health sector and the government.

Aguilera Suárez confirmed that communication with the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risks is not always fluid, and drug design is a long, costly process with multiple obstacles .

He proposed that the government should support pharmaceutical science not only by funding clinical trials, which are the most expensive , but also by creating a pharmaceutical industry that would allow us to be self-sufficient .

Ruiz Azuara and Aguilera Suarez mentioned that just as they seek to boost the semiconductor and electric car industries, it is essential to build a Mexican drug development center.

Setting it up would require an investment of 500 million pesos, with 20 to 30 people, they said. And it should be focused on developing remedies for the diseases that affect the largest population, such as diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and parasites.

To women who wish to work in this field, Ruiz Azuara urged them to maintain their passion for science: "Girls and women have the capacity to achieve important scientific advances. We can face great challenges and do so with rigor and seriousness ."

AFP

La Jornada Newspaper, Wednesday, April 30, 2025, p. 6

Ñiquén. In the fields of southern Chile, increasingly affected by drought, a new rice seed promises to transform its cultivation: with less water, it withstands more extreme climates without diminishing its productivity.

For millennia, humanity has flooded rice fields to eliminate weeds and prevent pests, but water scarcity has fueled a race to develop new production techniques for the world's most consumed food.

In the town of Ñiquén, in the Ñuble region south of Santiago, 25-year-old agricultural engineer Javier Muñoz was familiar only with flooding fields to produce grain.

But thanks to scientific research conducted on his land, he managed to reduce water consumption by half and maintain a similar production.

Rice farming has always been flooded; achieving such a profound change is historic , he says.

The technique was developed by Chilean scientist Karla Cordero of the Agricultural Research Institute, who, motivated by the drought that Chile has been experiencing for 15 years—linked by authorities to climate change—developed a more robust rice variety.

This new variety, called jasper, is not a genetically modified plant, but rather the result of crossing a Chilean seed with another of Russian origin, which is more resistant to extreme climates.

Cordero planted the new seed under the rice cultivation intensification system developed in 1983 in Madagascar by a French priest. This method consists primarily of alternating flooding with intermittent irrigation.

We realized it was possible to produce rice without flooding. And despite using fewer seeds, we achieved the same yield as a traditional system , Cordero explains.

In addition, in coordination with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, this technique will be tested in Brazil—the largest American rice producer—Uruguay, and Ecuador.

Jasper rice can better withstand storms, floods and heat waves because it is a more powerful plant, allowing it to produce rice with or without flooding, he notes.

Grows with half the water

Planted in rows spaced 30 centimeters apart, the new variety of long-grain white rice uses only half of the 2,500 liters of water typically required to produce one kilo.

Each seed sprouts nearly 30 daughter plants, almost 10 times more than in a conventional rice field. "It's a step toward the future ," Muñoz celebrates.

Water savings are also being pursued in North America and several countries in East and Southeast Asia , says Robert Zeigler, director of the International Rice Research Institute.