Where Ideas Grow

Maria de Sousa Award given to three i3S researchers

In the 1st edition of the Maria de Sousa Prize, five research projects were rewarded, three of which were led by young researchers in health sciences from the Institute for Research and Innovation in Health Sciences (i3S): Andreia Pereira, Daniela Freitas, and Mariana Osswald. The prize, worth around 25 thousand euros to each winner, also includes an internship at an international center of excellence in the area of ​​each of the awarded research projects.

Sponsored by the Ordem dos Médicos and the BIAL Foundation, this award pays tribute to the leading Portuguese immunologist and researcher Maria de Sousa, who died last year as a victim of Covid-19. The awards were handed over this Wednesday to the five Portuguese researchers, in a ceremony that took place at Lisbon’s Thalia Theatre and was presided by Prime Minister António Costa.
The president of Ordem dos Médicos, Miguel Guimarães, recalled that Maria de Sousa was never satisfied with what she knew and was always looking for more. “This is a characteristic of great scientists and I am sure that these five young awardees also feel this insatiable need to question and question in order to advance in scientific knowledge”

“Maria de Sousa lived Science vibrantly and always sought to create conditions so that young scientists could fulfill their dreams and their scientific paths. That is the objective of this Award, and I believe that, by rewarding these five researchers, we are perpetuating Maria's work”, added the president of the BIAL Foundation, Luís Portela.

Neuroscientist Rui Costa, who chaired the jury for this award, recalled that as a mentor Maria de Sousa was both generous and demanding: “Maria demanded the creation of something new in Science and that was one of the premises we took as a basis for selection of awarded projects”.

The projects

Researcher Andreia Pereira, with the project “BioTribo – Exploration of biomaterials as triboelectric nanogenerators for cardiovascular applications” aims to discover an inexhaustible biological energy source (from the human body itself) that can be used in monitoring cardiovascular diseases and in the development of devices implantable cardiac electronics. The researcher from the group “Advanced Graphene Biomaterials” explains that this alternative energy source to traditional batteries will be used in sensors that constantly monitor patients with cardiovascular disease, but also in electrical devices that are currently implanted in the patient, such as the pacemakers, ventricular assist devices and implantable cardiac defibrillators. In addition to exploring new energy sources, Andreia Pereira will also focus on the development of new methods for the early detection of obstructions in blood vessels.

This work will be carried out in collaboration with the Institute of Physics for Advanced Materials, Nanotechnology and Photonics (IFIMUP) of the University of Porto and also counts on the participation of Centro Hospitalar S. João and the Institute of Legal Medicine. The international internship will be held at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.

Entitled “Glycosylation of gastric cancer extracellular vesicles: its impact on intercellular communication in cancer and its potential for discovering new biomarkers”, the project led by Daniela Freitas from the i3S research group “Glycobiology in Cancer” has as it’s main objective to find new non-invasive biomarkers for stomach cancer, as well as new potential therapeutic targets, through a blood sample. Due to the lack of good biomarkers, stomach cancer is often detected in the advanced stages of the disease, which hinders the effectiveness of currently available therapies. Based on an analysis of the cellular vesicles that circulate in the bloodstream, the researcher explains that “we are going to study the role of glycans (complex carbohydrate structures) altered in stomach cancer in local and distance cell communication and reprogramming with the aim of find new biomarkers that make it possible to diagnose the disease earlier”. This work will be developed as part of a collaboration between i3S and Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

The project led by Mariana Osswald, a researcher at the group “Epithelial Polarity & Cell Division”, focuses on the study of epithelia, a type of tissue that covers all surfaces of the body and human organs and forms a protective barrier that controls everything that is absorbed and secreted. These functions depend on the three-dimensional structure of the epithelia, which can be damaged by different pressures such as compression or expansion. Within the scope of the project “How to regulate actomyosin-dependent forces to preserve the integrity of an epithelium”, the researcher wants to understand how epithelia react to these different pressures in order to maintain their integrity and their functions. To do this, she will study the organization of one of the main cellular structures responsible for regulating forces, actomyosin, in fruit fly epithelia. Considering that disturbances in the three-dimensional structure of tissues are associated with pathologies such as cancer or inflammatory diseases, Mariana Osswald emphasizes that it is essential to understand how tissues manage to maintain their integrity to help understand the biology of these diseases or design new treatments. In this project, innovative techniques will be used in a collaboration between i3S and the Curie Institute in Paris.

The other two winning researchers were Pedro Marques (Hospital de Santa Maria, Lisbon) with a project entitled “The role of CCL2 and IL-8 in the microenvironment of pituitary neuroendocrine tumors: relationship with tumor aggressiveness and their diagnostic-therapeutic utility”, and Sara Silva Pereira (João Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine (iMM), Lisbon) with a project on “The impact of parasite sequestration on the severity of trypanosomiasis”.