The medical doctor Helena Canhão, researcher from the Rheumatology Unit, Instituto de Medicina Molecular, was selected by the Harvard Medical School Portugal Program to a clinical research fellowship at Harvard University, USA.

A grant of 400.000 euros will allow the rheumatologist to spend two years doing research at the Harvard school of medicine and another two years in Portugal.

The project of the IMM researcher aims at understanding why some rheumatoid arthritis patients do not respond to the therapeutics with advanced drugs. According to the expert, although biological drugs are an "enormous advance" in treating the disease - which progressively destroys the joints - about a third of patients register no health improvement.

The researcher wants to develop novel methods to estimate in advance which patients will not respond to those drugs, in order to choose appropriate treatments for them and avoid the side effects of therapeutics, thus improving the patient´s life quality.

The Harvard Medical School Program, a partnership between the Portuguese government and Harvard University, awarded also another two grants of 115 million euro each to two junior portuguese medical doctors working on genetics and surgery. The junior grants will support two months of training at the Harvard medical school.

 

Unit of Communication and Training,
Institute of Molecular Medicine
ucom@fm.ul.pt