ABOUT MARIA
Maria was born in Madeira Island, Portugal. In 2005 she moved to Lisbon to study and in 2009 she graduated in Microbiology at he Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon. In 2017 she obtained her doctorate degree in Parasitology and Biomedical Sciences, by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon.
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Maria has always been driven by applied and clinical-related research and her career has been mostly dedicated to developing new tools and approaches to tackle antimalarial drug resistance – a major obstacle for malaria control and elimination. During her MSc and PhD studies, under the supervision of Prof Thomas Hanscheid, she developed a novel flow cytometric approach to assess antimalarial drug resistance. This approach was developed using rodent models of malaria, in vitro cultures of human malaria parasites and validated in the field, using samples from malaria patients in Gabon.
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After obtaining her PhD with honors and distinction in Biomedical Sciences, she moved to Brisbane-Australia to pursue her post-doctoral studies in Dr James McCarthy group - the world’s leading group of malaria volunteer infection studies, where phase I clinical trials are performed in malaria infected volunteers to test new drugs and vaccines against malaria. During this time, Maria focused on elucidating the in vivo biology of malaria parasites after drug exposure and developed a novel ex vivo approach that allows to assess the viability of parasites in malaria volunteer infection studies. Results revealed that the key metric used to assess drug activity in humans may not be an accurate representation of the antimalarial drug activity. These findings will re-shape the way we currently think about drug testing in humans and may open new venues to explore novel antimalarial compounds.
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More recently, during her second post-doc at iMM in the group of Prof Gonçalo Bernardes, she investigated two independent therapeutic approaches for COVID-19, based on the use of small-molecule RNA click-degraders and de novo protein decoys. She established a transgenic mouse model of SARS-CoV-2 infection that allowed the investigation and characterization of the pre-clinical efficacy of novel compounds. She also led a collaboration with Neoleukin Therapeutics Inc and discovered that a single-dose of hACE2 de novo decoys not only prevents SARS-CoV-2 lethal infection in mice, but also protects them from a second SARS-CoV-2 infection.
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In March 2023, she was awarded with the “la Caixa” Foundation Junior Leader Fellowship to establish her own line of translational research in the field of infectious diseases. Currently, she is developing innovative antimalarial drugs by targeting malaria parasites with de novo protein decoys.
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