FMUL News
Robert Badura awarded the Gilead Génese Programme
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The Gilead Génese Programme, which has existed since 2013, has a two-pronged approach, encouraging research, production and sharing of scientific knowledge in Portugal and promoting initiatives that enable the implementation of good practice in patient care.
This programme is part of Gilead Sciences' social responsibility policy and aims at fostering community involvement.
The 2017 edition of the Gilead Génese Programme, whose overall value was 300 thousand euros, evaluated 32 applications, and 6 scientific research projects were winners.
One of the winning projects is the work of Robert Badura, Guest Assistant Lecturer at FMUL, as part of the ongoing research on patients recently infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, and results from a collaboration between the HSM Infectious Disease Department of the HSM/CHLN/FMUL (Robert Badura), the Clinical Immunology Department of the IMM/FMUL (Prof. Ana Espada Sousa and Postdoctoral student Ana Catarina Santos) and the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (Ana Abecasis, PhD).
In the words of the award winner, Dr. Robert Badura, “The HIV virus establishes, very early in the infection, a reservoir, which allows its persistence in the host. The virus forms this reservoir by inserting its genetic material into the DNA of the host's cells. Antiretroviral therapy, initiated early in the infection, manages to limit this reservoir, although it cannot destroy it. This research aims at evaluating the impact on the reservoir if antiretroviral therapy is started very early on in the seroconversion, namely, with respect to the reservoir's kinetics and its distribution pattern by the main populations of T-CD4+ lymphocytes."
It should be noted that this Project represents the true essence of CAML, as it is the result of a FMUL-IMM-HSM collaboration.