Keynote Lecture: Cancer Cell Therapy Comes of Age

Date: 22 June, 2023

Schedule: 4pm - 5.30pm

Venue: Seminar Room (2nd floor, main building, no registration needed)

The Champalimaud Foundation has an experimental robot called Wingy, which runs Chat GPT and is expected one day to be able to greet patients who come to its Clinical Centre. But will Wingy replace the people currently in charge of that job?, asked Pedro Garcia da Silva, neuroscientist and Scientific Coordinator at Champalimaud Research, during his talk at the Champalimaud Cancer Nurse Conference, which took place at the Foundation on May 19th. 

Radiotherapy, or radiation therapy, is one of the pillars of cancer treatment. Radiotherapy preferentially uses X-rays to eliminate the solid manifestations of malignant tumours. 

It is estimated that 60% of cancer patients are treated with radiotherapy at a given phase of their disease, either as part of radical therapeutics (ablative) protocols or of symptomatic and palliative protocols.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of death from cancer worldwide conferring high morbidity, mortality and costs. In Portugal, the scenario is no different. According to the World Health Organisation (Globocan), in 2020, 5415 new cases of Lung Cancer were diagnosed in our country, being the 4th most frequently diagnosed tumour in both genders (the 2nd if breast and prostate neoplasms are excluded), with greater relevance in males.