Luisa Botella was awarded the EURORDIS Black Pearl Award

Luisa Botella, a researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas Margarita Salas (CSIC) and head of the Translational Research in rare diseases with vascular involvement: from the lab to the patients, has been awarded the EURORDIS Scientific Award 2023 this year call of the EURORDIS Black Pearl Awards. The award ceremony was held on February 21, 2023, in Brussels.

This award, granted by the EURORDIS Rare Disease Europe alliance, goes to Luisa Botella “for an incredible twenty years of research into Rare Diseases, and potential treatments, most specifically, her successful work towards the development of four drugs for the treatment of Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia and Von Hippel-Lindau Syndrome. EURORDIS would like to recognize the enormous impact that Dr. Botella’s research has had on many patients’ lives”.

Dr. Luisa Botella has worked on Rare Diseases for many years and is one of the most recognized faces of the CIB Margarita Salas in this field. She has worked towards, advised for, and led numerous research projects into Rare Diseases. She was among the first members who founded the Spanish Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia Patient Association and has been a member of their advisory board since 2005. Furthermore, Dr. Botella has been an active collaborator of FEDER since 2012, has led the expert Rare Disease Lab Consortium CIBERER, has been a VASCERN HHT ePag since 2016, and has published over 60 papers on diagnosis, molecular basis, and therapeutic approaches.

Luisa has always shown her compromise with patients by working closely with the associations and with the medical experts in the diseases on which she focuses her research, as she herself tells in these videos:

EURORDIS-Rare Diseases Europe is a non-profit alliance of over 1000 rare diseases patient organizations from 74 countries that work together to improve the lives of over 300 million people living with rare diseases globally.