Belinda Sánchez Ramírez

Senior Researcher, Doctor of Biological Sciences and director of Tumor Immunology at the Center for Molecular Immunology. Award from the Academy of Sciences of Cuba for four years. Hero of Labor of the Republic of Cuba in 2021.

Dr. Belinda Sánchez, Director of Immunobiology at the Center for Molecular Immunology and founder of the Center was elected Vice President and Secretary respectively of the new Board of Directors of the Cuban Society of Immunology in 2020.

Belinda Sánchez, a degree holder in biochemistry, is Director of Immunology and Immunotherapy at the Center for Molecular Immunology (CIM) and is one of those Cuban women who has dedicated her life to science.

She always liked sciences more than humanities and within sciences she liked chemistry and mathematics; she also had a very good neighbor who was studying biochemistry who started telling her about the career, so she had to decide between biochemistry and medicine and she went to an open house at the Faculty of Biology, there she fell in love with biochemistry, microbiology and well that was the career she requested, the one she obtained and believes she did not make a mistake.

She studied Biochemistry at the University of Havana, Cuba. She studied at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry.

Once graduated she began working at CIM. Since she started working, she has done so in the cancer vaccine department, that has been her specialty.

Some are therapeutic vaccines, for sick people, and that requires a lot of Immunology, a lot of study of tumor biology.

Some time later, in 2010 she assumed the position of director, but the area she directs is especially dedicated precisely to the study of tumor biology, the immune system, making vaccines for cancer and other drugs such as monoclonal antigens.

With the COVID-19 pandemic she faced the fear of the unknown at first, especially because it arrived very quickly. From the time we knew there was an epidemic in China that suddenly became a pandemic, until it reached Cuba no more than three months passed.

So it was the fear of the unknown, but what happened is that we knew that somehow we could do something because biotechnology in Cuba has been demonstrating for many years that vaccines or other types of medications can be made for the treatment of people. Our biotechnology had made preventive vaccines for children against viruses or bacteria, we had the experience of having made vaccines against cancer which is not an easy disease to approach, therefore, we could assume, we were confident that we could do something. Belinda actively participated in the process of creating the Cuban Soberana vaccines against covid 19.

She is the mother of two boys aged 18 and 22, Camilo the youngest and Abel the oldest, the oldest studies at the university and the youngest in 12th grade at Lenin. She lives with her children and her mother.