i3S researcher receives award to study pediatric brain cancer in Canada
i3S PhD student Bárbara Soares Ferreira has recently been awarded the 2026 Travel Award in Cell Biology, granted by the Jacobo & Estela Klip Fund at SickKids Hospital in Canada, in recognition of the work she has been developing in the field of pediatric brain cancer. The funding, worth around nine thousand euros, will enable her to undertake a one-year research internship at a research center in Canada.
Bárbara’s project, supervised by researcher Jorge Lima, focuses on pediatric low-grade gliomas, the most common brain tumors in children, and will be carried out in the laboratory of Cynthia Hawkins, a neuropathologist and senior scientist at the Arthur and Sonia Labatt Brain Tumour Research Centre, based at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), a world-leading institution in pediatric health research. The aim, she emphasizes, “is to contribute to the development of more effective and durable therapeutic strategies, with a direct impact on improving treatment and quality of life for children with low-grade brain tumors.”
Pediatric low-grade gliomas, the PhD student explains, “have high survival rates, but many patients, particularly those whose tumors cannot be completely removed by surgery, experience disease progression and long-term side effects associated with treatments.” In some cases, targeted therapies have improved clinical outcomes, but “treatment resistance and tumor recurrence remain significant clinical challenges,” highlights Bárbara Ferreira.
According to the i3S researcher, this study aims to “understand how the tumor microenvironment, composed of surrounding brain and immune cells, contributes to therapeutic resistance and recurrent tumor growth.” To this end, Bárbara Ferreira will use advanced spatial biology technologies and patient-derived tumor organoids, co-cultured with brain and immune cells, to analyze the cellular interactions that influence responses to targeted therapies.
During her research period in Canada, the researcher adds, “I will develop these co-culture systems and receive specialized training in single-cell RNA sequencing analysis and spatial transcriptomics, cutting-edge techniques in biomedical research.”
Bárbara Ferreira is enrolled in the PhD program of the Lisbon Academic Medical Center and is carrying out her research work at i3S, within the Cancer Signalling & Metabolism research group.
