Beyond Bias: Personalising Medicine for Everyone
Date: 29 June 2026
Location: Main Auditorium, Building Abel Salazar
Personalised medicine promises to transform healthcare by tailoring prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to each individual's genetic profile. But this promise remains incomplete: much of the genomic research continues to focus on populations of European descent, creating a structural bias that limits its applicability and deepens inequalities in access to its benefits.
This session starts from this imbalance to question it. By bringing genetic diversity — particularly that of African populations, which concentrates the greatest human genetic variability — to the centre of the discussion, it proposes to rethink the foundations of precision medicine. Not only as an imperative of equity, but as a scientific opportunity: broadening the scope of research is also expanding what we know about human biology and disease.
In a country whose genetic and cultural history is deeply linked to Africa, this reflection takes on a particular dimension. Portugal can and should play an active role in building more inclusive research networks, in close collaboration with Portuguese-speaking African countries, contributing to the development of scientific capacities, advanced training, and the production of shared knowledge.
Integrated into the i3S 10th anniversary celebrations, this session affirms a clear vision: precision medicine that is not limited to a few, but is built for everyone — more representative, more robust, and ultimately, more just.
Language: Session in English
Registration: free but mandatory
Venue
Main Auditorium, Building Abel Salazar
Address: Largo do Prof. Abel Salazar, 4050-202, Porto
Program
Preliminary Program
17h00 Opening
Precision Medicine and Genomics
17h10 Michèle Ramsay, Director and Professor in Human Genetics, SBIMB - Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa?
17h50 João Lavinha, Instituto Nacional de Saúde Doutor Ricardo Jorge, Portugal
18h20 Break
18h40 Building scientific capacity: training, returning, transforming
18h45 Roundtable
Towards a truly global medicine: science, cooperation and impact
Moderator
Alexandre Quintanilha, Commissioner for the 10th i3S Anniversary
19h30 Closing of the celebrations
Cláudio Sunkel, i3S Director
Speakers
Luisa Pereira
i3S - Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde da Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Luísa Pereira has been a researcher since 2004 and has led the Genetic Diversity group since 2006. She is a population geneticist whose work focuses on characterising global diversity with the aim of inferring the evolution of the human species and assessing the influence of ancestry on susceptibility to and resistance against complex diseases, particularly cancer and dengue fever. She is internationally recognised for her research on the phylogeography of mitochondrial DNA, particularly in Europe, Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. She has led several national and international projects and is a co-author of over 80 articles published in international journals, with an h-index of 28. Luísa Pereira is also the coordinator of the Cancer Research Program at i3S.
Michèle Ramsay
Director and Professor in Human Genetics, SBIMB - Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa?
Michèle Ramsay is a professor in the Division of Human Genetics at the National Health Laboratory Service and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg. Her research interests include the genetic basis and molecular epidemiology of single-gene disorders in South African populations and the role of genetic and epigenetic variation in the molecular aetiology of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders and other diseases exacerbated by adverse lifestyle choices.
Ramsay’s current research collaborations include studies on obesity, hypertension, bone development, HIV related kidney disease and glaucoma in South African populations. She is interim director of the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (Wits University), which focuses on a molecular understanding of non-communicable diseases in African populations; joint PI for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded training project entitled “Wits Non-Communicable Disease Research Leadership Program”; joint PI of the first phase of the “Southern African Human Genome Programme”; chair of the Southern African Society for Human Genetics; chair of the Wits Bioinformatics Steering Group; joint champion of a cross-faculty Research Thrust, “Molecular Biosciences: Health for Africa”; and joint editor and author of a textbook, “Molecular Medicine for Clinicians” (Wits University Press, 2009).
João Lavinha
Instituto Nacional de Saúde Doutor Ricardo Jorge, Portugal
João Lavinha was born in Sintra (1949). Building on a background in chemistry, supplemented by a course of study in biomedical sciences, he began his studies in human molecular biology in Portugal in 1983. He was director of the Dr Ricardo Jorge National Institute of Health (2000–2004), where he is a researcher in the Department of Human Genetics. Abroad, he has carried out research in departments at the universities of Glasgow, Cagliari and London, and at an INSERM unit in Paris. Member of the board of the European Society of Human Genetics (1997–2002). His scientific interests include (i) molecular epidemiology and the control of genetic disease in the community; (ii) the genetics of disease susceptibility; (iii) genomics and public health; and (iv) the exploration of the environment/health interface.
