Public Lecture: Exploration of the Unknown in the Age of Science

By Ronald A. DePinho, MD, PhD (hc), DSc (hc) 
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas

This public lecture will address the escalating medical, economic, and social challenges posed by an aging world population, highlighting how scientific discovery is illuminating new preventive and curative strategies to mitigate this burden.

This conference stands as a landmark event for the Botton-Champalimaud Pancreatic Cancer Centre in 2024 and will unite leading minds in translational science, oncology and surgery to tackle the complexities of pancreatic cancer.

The conference will serve as a pivotal platform for the exchange of groundbreaking insights, state-of-the-art surgical methodologies, and innovative therapeutic approaches that will ultimately enhance patient care and outcomes on a global scale.

The images created during the daily scientific and medical endeavours at the Champalimaud Foundation can be as beautiful and compelling as any work of art. To the untrained eye, these images might also appear baffling, but, if you know what you’re looking at, they may just reveal information that can spark discoveries, contribute to the improvement of patient quality of life and maybe even alter our understanding of reality.

Rita Fior, leader of the Cancer Development and Innate Immune Evasion Group at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF), has been studying for several years the power of zebrafish “avatars”, or zAvatars, of cancer patients to help guide therapeutic decisions. The goal: to predict individual cancer treatment outcomes, thus enabling the selection of the best available chemotherapy treatment for each patient.

The images created during the daily scientific and medical endeavours at the Champalimaud Foundation can be as beautiful and compelling as any work of art. To the untrained eye, these images might also appear baffling, but, if you know what you’re looking at, they may just reveal information that can spark discoveries, contribute to the improvement of patient quality of life and maybe even alter our understanding of reality.

The images created during the daily scientific and medical endeavours at the Champalimaud Foundation can be as beautiful and compelling as any work of art. To the untrained eye, these images might also appear baffling, but, if you know what you’re looking at, they may just reveal information that can spark discoveries, contribute to the improvement of patient quality of life and maybe even alter our understanding of reality.

The images created during the daily scientific and medical endeavours at the Champalimaud Foundation can be as beautiful and compelling as any work of art. To the untrained eye, these images might also appear baffling, but, if you know what you’re looking at, they may just reveal information that can spark discoveries, contribute to the improvement of patient quality of life and maybe even alter our understanding of reality.

Join us for the FAITH Project's closing conference, where we'll delve into the crucial intersection of the FAITH AI technology and trials as well as key issues of mental health, survivorship in cancer and lessons learnt.

Meeting Description

This meeting collaboration between the Association for Cancer Immunotherapy CIMT and the Champalimaud Foundation will address promising paths towards effective cellular treatment modalities for patients with solid cancer and discuss the boundaries of synthetically engineered immune cells. The meeting will also discuss the innovation gap between academic and small biotech driven research, and the challenges of safe, biologically, and clinically relevant phase I / II clinical trials. 

A study published in mid-April in the journal Nature Communications by Leopoldo Petreanu and his team, from the Cortical Circuits lab at Champalimaud Research, concludes that sensory processing by the visual cortex’s is not purely visual. More to the point, the study shows that, right from the early stages of sensory processing, the visual cortex integrates information from other sensory modalities, such as sounds.