A study published today, April 13th, in the journal Nature Neuroscience provides a surprising answer to this question by showing that, rather than committing to a single strategy, the brain can compute multiple alternative decision strategies simultaneously.

The study, led by Fanny Cazettes and senior authors Zachary Mainen and Alfonso Renart, at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, performed a specially-designed experiment which used a kind of “virtual reality” setup for mice, in which the animals were tasked with searching for water in a virtual world. 

March was Multiple Myeloma Awareness Month. In this short video, Cristina João, Haemato-oncologist of the Haemato-oncology Unit at the Champalimaud Foundation, explains what this pathology is and talks about the activities that the Unit has developed for improving the care of people with Multiple Myeloma. She also points out that, in addition to clinical activity, the Haemato-Oncology Unit does translational research through the Foundation's Lymphoma and Myeloma Research Group, which she leads.

Neste último vídeo da série, Laura Fernández, Cirurgiã Colorretal, fala da investigação da equipa sobre o Protocolo Watch&Wait (W&W).

Em estudos recentes, mostraram que a probabilidade de os doentes com cancro retal, que permanecem livres de tumores durante cinco anos, voltarem a desenvolver a doença é quase nula. Atualmente, a equipa está a tentar determinar quais os doentes, integrados no programa W&W, que serão mais susceptíveis de apresentar metástases.

On behalf of the International Cancer Imaging Society (ICIS) and the Champalimaud Foundation, we would like to invite you to register for our jointly hosted meeting 'AI and Machine Learning in Cancer Imaging 3.0', which will be held on 30 June and 1 July 2023.  The meeting will take place at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, in Lisbon. 

In Portugal, the winning scientists are Isabel Gordo (Gulbenkian Institute of Science, IGC), Maria Manuel Mota (João Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine, iMM), Mariana Pinho (ITQB-NOVA) and Henrique Veiga-Fernandes (Champalimaud Foundation). Each will receive between €2.5M and €3.5M for the development of research projects over the next five years.

Modern scientific endeavours are often guided by the positivistic ideal of obtaining a neutral, detached point of observation from which truths about the world can be deduced and believed to hold independently of the socio-political context in which they were obtained.

Scientists and doctors at the Champalimaud Foundation, in Lisbon, have joined efforts to reduce the toxicity of so-called “neoadjuvant chemoradiation” – the combination of chemotherapy plus radiotherapy – for the treatment of rectal cancer. If further confirmed, their results, published a few months ago in the journal Frontiers in Oncology, could in the not-so-distant future help many patients with rectal cancer, especially the more elderly and frail ones.