Guanajuato, Gto., July 24, 2016.- "Life starts at the end of your comfort zone" is a phrase of the American novelist Neale Donald Walsch. This quote has guided the performance and work towards health done from the University of Guanajuato graduate, Mónica Guzmán, Ph.D.

Ph.D. Guzmán is a graduate from the major in Chemistry from the University of Guanajuato, since she started her career she set goals that many thought were impossible. One was to find a way to eradicate leukemia, a disease that attacks a large amount of people around the world causing death.

She has proposed this challenge since research, so she has dedicated a large part of her life to studying the disease, and if this wasn't enough, to be able to do her research, she proposed to have her own laboratory, goal she already fulfilled. Ph.D. Guzmán lives in New York where she leads her laboratory "Guzman Lab" at the Weill Medical College and works with researchers and students from different countries.

In an interview, Ph.D. Guzmán mentioned: "The research in my lab focus on the stem cells that cause leukemia. We mainly study Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), which is a disease that mostly affects adults, but can also affect children."

She referred this as a devastating disease, one of the reasons the researcher expressed is that therapy hasn't changed in the last 40 years. "The chemotherapy applied doesn't eliminate the stem cells that cause leukemia because they have different characteristics. In my laboratory we focus on searching what are the characteristics of the leukemia stem cells, that can distinguish them from normal stem cells, that provide blood."

With the previous, they expect to find therapies that can specifically eliminate the leukemia stem cells, without damaging the normal stem cells, with the objective that patients with leukemia have a better chance of survivability.

Ph.D. Mónica Guzmán talked about the rewards she has had by making research on leukemia: "about the satisfactions, let me give you an example: about a year ago, from nowhere, a person wrote me telling that his mom had leukemia. He had found my article in internet while looking for information. In his email, he thanked me for making the research because it helped him understand why he mustn't give up. He told me that the article helped him understand why his mom had relapsed but there still are options."

"That as a great satisfaction for me, because, although it looks like hard work, and with some frustrations along the way, you know that every effort is worth when someone reads your articles and is learning about what you wrote and hopes appear to keep moving forward. Maybe the result is not immediate, but it does makes a difference."