Two i3S researchers win the Maria de Sousa Prize in the area of health sciences
Researchers Inês Alves and João Neto were two of the winners of the third edition of the Maria de Sousa Prize, promoted by the Order of Doctors and the BIAL Foundation in honor of the immunologist Maria de Sousa. The projects in the area of lupus and cancer were awarded with up to 30 thousand euros each, including an internship at an international center of excellence.
The project by Inês Alves, from the “Immunology, Cancer & Glycomedicine” group, focuses on Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) - a classic autoimmune disease with greater prevalence in young women of working age with a peak incidence between 16 and 49 years. The impact on patients’ quality of life is significant. One of the most serious forms of the disease is lupus nephritis, which affects the kidney by causing a massive infiltration of inflammatory cells, which can progress to chronic/terminal kidney disease.
Early diagnosis and clinical and therapeutic monitoring of these patients is still a major challenge, as there are no biomarkers capable of predicting which patients will progress to a complicated disease, preventing the early identification and selection of these patients for more targeted therapies. Inês Alves proposes to create “new ways of diagnosing and predicting how serious lupus will be for each person, allowing us to optimize treatment strategies for these patients and avoid the aggressive symptoms that characterize this disease”.
In a previous study, explains the researcher, “we discovered a specific (atypical) signature of glycans (sugars) on the surface of kidney cells from patients with lupus, glycans that are normally found in microorganisms, such as fungi and viruses, which explains the loss of immunological tolerance associated with Lupus”. With this work the researcher aims to clarify whether lupus patients produce special antibodies against glycans that are involved in the loss of tissue tolerance and kidney damage. Specifically the objective “is to identify the presence of specific antibodies against sugars in the blood of patients with lupus, study the B cells responsible for their production and test the pathological effect of these antibodies, that is to check whether they are responsible for the severity and susceptibility of lupus disease”.
Winning the Maria de Sousa Prize will allow the researcher to develop part of her project at The Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research in Israel. For Inês Alves “it is an honor, as an immunologist at the beginning of her career, to receive this award that honors the great immunologist Maria de Sousa. Not only will it allow me to access innovative antibody screening techniques in autoimmune patients, but it will also bring a new marker (less invasive than the current kidney biopsy) for diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutic strategy, improving the quality of life of these patients”.
Gastric cancer: circumventing resistance to therapy
The project by researcher João Neto from the “Expression Regulation in Cancer” group focuses on the study of gastric cancer (GC) - the fifth most common type of cancer, the fourth cause of cancer mortality in the world, and the third in Portugal. This cancer has a high mortality rate because it is generally diagnosed at an advanced stage, where effective treatment options are scarce. One of the few treatments available at this stage is anti-HER2 therapy, and yet only around 20-30% of GC patients are eligible for treatment with HER2 inhibitors such as trastuzumab. Within this percentage, more than half either do not respond or end up developing resistance to this therapy. The mechanisms that impede the effectiveness of trastuzumab in HER2-positive patients are not yet well known and this is precisely where João Neto intends to focus.
According to the researcher, there are two hypotheses: “There are genetic changes in HER2-positive tumors that can impair the effectiveness of anti-HER2 therapies, and identifying what they are is what I want to discover; or inhibiting the HER2 protein alone is not enough and it may be necessary to combine therapies to improve patient response rates, so I also intend to identify new combined therapies (drug combinations)”.
The objective, he emphasizes, “is to contribute to the development of new treatment options for patients with HER2-positive GC who do not respond or who acquire resistance to treatment with HER2 inhibitors, allowing to improve the prognosis of these patients, and identify patients who do not benefit from anti-HER2 therapy, thus sparing unnecessary side effects”.
This work will be developed at The Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI), Robotics & Screening Center, in the Netherlands. “I feel very honored, as it is an award that pays tribute to Maria de Sousa, and very happy, of course, that my project was one of the winners”, says the researcher.
The remaining winners are: Nuno Dinis Alves and Sara Calafate, both from the Institute of Research in Life and Health Sciences (ICVS) at the University of Minho, with projects in the area of chronic stress and Alzheimer's disease, and also Catarina Palma dos Reis from Maternidade Dr. Alfredo da Costa with a research project focused on fetal growth restriction. The winning works were chosen by a Jury chaired by neuroscientist Rui Costa, president and executive director of the Allen Institute in the United States.