Two French women, the chemist Claude Grison and the immunologist Elodie Belnoue, as well as the Swiss engineer Madiha Derouazi received, on Tuesday June 21, the prize for the best inventor 2022 awarded by the European Patent Office (EPO).
Claude Grison (CNRS) was rewarded in the “research” category for his work on plant ecocatalysts made from invasive plants, making it possible to clean up mining soils thanks to metal-eating plants and to create new chemical molecules.
Elodie Belnoue, a former doctoral student in immunology at the Bichat hospital in Paris and now research director of the Swiss company Amal Therapeutics (Boehringer Ingelheim), was awarded in the SME category for the development with her Swiss teammate, an engineer in biotechnology, Madiha Derouazi of a new medical platform to manufacture therapeutic vaccines against different types of cancer.
