To celebrate International Nurses Day, we asked Champalimaud Foundation’s oncology nurses to explore the parallels between their personal and professional lives. From cooking to photography, from Crossfit to ballroom dancing, what similarities with nursing do they find?

On the Honourable Mentions, the jury president, anatomopathology doctor and researcher Manuel Sobrinho Simões, referenced that “the jury distinguished (…) two works that show medical research's relevance and urgency; on the one hand cancer and new therapies that mark the research that is being done in this field and, on the other, the pandemic that dominated the year 2020.”

Following the highly successful 2019 edition, attended by around 400 delegates from over 30 countries, the 2021 meeting aims to promote better understanding and application of AI and ML in cancer imaging; and provide a multidisciplinary forum for radiologists, technicians/radiographers, scientists and industrial partners to discuss and interact.

The original idea came from a gastroenterologist at the Champalimaud Foundation, in Lisbon. But transforming it into the object that now embodies it took several years of work by a team of scientists, doctors and engineers in Portugal and Belgium. The first results of a pilot study of this non-surgical device, called MAGUS (for Magnetic Gastrointestinal Universal Septotome), which performs a “cut and paste” procedure in the human body, were announced in 2020.

Radical surgical removal of the prostate is the most frequent treatment for prostate cancer when the tumour is localised (meaning it has not spread outside the prostate). 

This workshop brings together agency, regulator, industry and primary researcher communities in biomedical sciences to talk freely about methods and models and explore common ground.

This is a Champalimaud Foundation workshop co-organised with CONGENTO and QuantOCancer projects, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and FRESCI.

During this event we will:

The starting point for the discussion was the “Inside the Unknown” Science Collection, a project developed by this group in collaboration with Champalimaud Research Labs. The genesis of the project, the creative process behind it, the articulation of all the team’s expertises, main challenges and evaluation metrics, were some of the topics addressed in this conversation.

Champalimaud Foundation’s work with artificial intelligence is the fourth best in the worldIn the Nature TOP 10, there are institutions from Germany, the United States of America, Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. According to Leonor Beleza, President of the Champalimaud Foundation, “it is a great honour for Portugal and for the Champalimaud Foundation to be at the forefront of scientific research”.

The panel included three in-house specialists: immunologist Thiago Carvalho and oncologists Fátima Cardoso, head of the Breast Unit at the Champalimaud Clinical Centre, and Cristina João, a haematologist in the Haemato-Oncology Unit who also heads the Myeloma and Lymphoma Research Lab at Champalimaud Research.

Cancer researcher Rita Fior uses zebrafish to study human cancer. Though this may seem like an unlikely match, her work shows great promise with forthcoming applications in personalised medicine. 

The basic principle of Fior's approach relies on transplanting human cancer cells into dozens of zebrafish larvae. The fish then serve as "living test tubes" where various treatments, such as different chemotherapy drugs, can be tested to reveal which works best. The assay is rapid, producing an answer within four short days.