She studied abroad and will work abroad, because the economic proposals received – in the face of an enviable curriculum – for a job in Italy would not have allowed her «to even bear the costs of bills and petrol».
That of the young Alessandra Qualizza from Cividale, projected towards a future dedicated to research, is unfortunately one of the many stories of occupational flight from the Bel Paese, which is unable to compete even remotely with the panorama of other European states, limiting itself to the old continent.
Thus excellences such as Alessandra flee, who as soon as she obtained her master’s degree in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Leuven, in Belgium, was hired as a Research technician in the laboratory in which she prepared her thesis, centered on the study of the cellular signals responsible for chemotherapy resistance in breast cancer.
Started at the Imc Fh University of Krems, in Austria (faculty of medical and pharmaceutical biotechnologies), the brilliant student’s academic career continued at Harvard University in Boston (where she defended her thesis for the three-year degree), to end precisely in Belgium.
«The beauty of all the countries in which I have lived – comments the new doctor – is that there are many laboratories in which students are treated as real workers, during the training internships: they can thus concretely apply what they learned during the theoretical lessons, something on which in Italy there is little focus.
In this way I was able to contribute to the clarification of the function of the different conformations of the glycoproteins of the HIV virus, verifying how each variant affects the effectiveness of the methods used to fight the virus, both antiviral and antibody. The discovery of my laboratory was published in the Journal of virology, in an article of which I am the second author: a great satisfaction.
The master’s thesis instead focused on a research project on triple negative breast cancer, a type of tumor that is very difficult to fight because it does not have any of the therapeutic targets in use today.
My team discovered that there is a cellular signal, called Wnt, that is hyperactive in the specific tumor subtype, which is probably responsible for resistance to chemotherapy, the only currently available treatment.
We are now trying to study its mechanisms using mice with triple-negative tumors obtained directly from patients in the oncology department of the university hospital: we are well on the way to publishing the results.”
A possible return to her homeland does not exclude it, the researcher, but certainly the prospect is not among her imminent plans: «On two occasions I have tried to return, but despite the curriculum presented what was offered to me for a full time in the my field of study, whether in a research institute or in a company, would not have allowed me to survive.
For the same type of work in Belgium they offer me 2,000 euros a month, net, and various concessions».
It is not for nothing that Alessandra met “many Italians” in what is becoming her adopted country.