PhD student receives award for best oral presentation

Sara Moura, PhD student of the BiotechHealth doctoral program, and researching in the “Microenvironments for New Therapies” group at i3S, received the award for Best Oral Presentation at the “8th Advanced Summer School – Interrogations at the Biointerface: Fibrosis from mechanisms to the clinic”, organized by researchers from ICBAS and i3S/INEB, which took place at the end of June.

In the presented work, entitled “Modulation of H19 to change the expression of collagen and other extracellular matrix components”, the researchers decoded how a non-coding RNA (i.e. RNA that is not translated into a protein), in particular H19, is capable of regulating the extracellular matrix components of stromal mesenchymal cells. The objective of the work is to explore a part of the DNA that was thought to be “junk” to be able to model components of the extracellular matrix, combining regenerative engineering with molecular biology.

The results of this work may have an impact on bone diseases, such as osteoporosis, which affects more than 200 million people worldwide and which in Portugal affects one in three women over 50 years of age.

This study was developed within the scope of the R2Bone-POCI-01-0145-FEDER-031402 project, financed by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, and had the joint participation of researchers from ICBAS and i3S/INEB, having been guided by the researcher Maria Inês Almeida, from the Molecular Biology department at ICBAS.