With a background in Biochemistry (BSc, 2008) and Molecular and Cellular Biology (MSc, 2009) and after an international PhD from the University of Coimbra (2013), with the University of Minnesota, Duluth, USA, Carolina Moreira joined IBMC/i3S in 2014 to proceed with her research career in molecular mechanisms of disease. She made important contributions to the understanding of ferritin biology and functions. She found that H chains of ferritin (FTH) have a non-redundant role in macrophage physiology, being essential for cell protection against oxidative stress and modulating macrophage activation by immune and microbial stimuli. She also found that FTH is released from macrophages to the circulation during infection in vivo and that FTH produced by myeloid cells has a key impact on tissue iron distribution and susceptibility to infection. She was enrolled in the management and execution of the project that funded this work. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, besides training i3S researchers to work under BSL3 conditions, she established collaborations with clinicians from 2 hospitals in the North of Portugal. She studied the impact of SARS-CoV-2 infection on the patients’ iron metabolism. This study revealed a strong impact of COVID-19 in iron-related serum markers, including ferritin. Most importantly, it disclosed low serum iron at admission as a strong predictor of severe COVID-19, suggesting a simple way to better evaluate patients at hospital admission and increase the efficiency of their subsequent clinical management. Now, she is supervising 1 PhD and 3 MSc students and is investigating the characteristics of circulating ferritin in different diseases, including infections and oncological diseases. She is studying the mechanisms of release, its H/L ratio and its glycosylation pattern in collaboration with Glycobiology in Cancer group of i3S.