PhD student wins Scholarship with thesis on gastric cancer

Doctoral student Liliana Santos Ferreira, from the research group “Glycobiology in Cancer”, was recently rewarded by the Directorate-General for Higher Education with a Merit Scholarship, worth around three thousand euros, for the classification obtained in the academic year 2019/2020. The student concluded her master’s degree with a final grade of 19.95 points (20 points in the thesis and 19 points in the project evaluation) and was the first co-author of an article published in the journal “Cancers”.

“It was important to have a good team and a good supervisor, Filipe Pinto, working with me. There were ups and downs, but it pays off when you have a taste for science”, explains Liliana Santos Ferreira. “The work carried out throughout my dissertation allowed me to demonstrate the importance of proteoglycans, namely biglycan, in the aggressiveness of gastric cancer and, consequently, as a potential prognostic biomarker and therapeutic target”, she adds.

Researcher Filipe Pinto, who supervised the student during her master’s degree, emphasizes that Liliana Santos Ferreira “was exceptional, very dedicated and hard-working. She did her master's thesis during the pandemic and managed to implement new experimental techniques, which gave rise to an article. She did most of the experimental part in four months. In other words, she managed to manage very well the little time she had to write her thesis and publish”.

The now PhD student received an FCT grant to develop the project “Development of glycan-based organoids as superior cancer models to predict and identify novel personalized therapies for gastric cancer patients”. As part of this grant, she explains, “I intend to develop preclinical models of gastric cancer based on the profile of sugars (glycans). For this, I will develop avatars of the tumor of origin – organoids or mini-organs – and modulate the expression of glycans associated with resistance to the treatment. This approach will allow the identification of new glycotherapies aimed at each individual - personalized medicine”.