Vanessa Oliveira, researcher at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular in Portugal won a prestigious and competitive Early Career Bayer Hemophilia Award. Oliveira will develop a strategy to reprogramme the immune system of hemophilia patients to avoid immune targeting of the most used clotting therapeutics. Oliveira was the only European researcher to win this award in 2010, in a total of 5 worldwide. The Portuguese researcher will receive US$170.000 to develop her project during two years.
Vanessa Oliveira will develop a strategy to reprogramme the immune system of hemophilia patients to avoid immune targeting of the most used clotting therapeutics. The treatment of hemophilia is based in the administration of laboratory produced clotting factors that the patients cannot make due to a genetic defect. However, a significant proportion of patients with severe hemophilia develop immune responses against these therapeutic clotting factors, which limits the efficacy of the treatment.
Although there have been several attempts to impair this undesired immune response, none of them has revealed efficient. Vanessa will study the causes for the limited efficacy of previously attempted methods to suppress undesirable immune response in hemophilia treatment, while developing new strategies to induce the patient's immune tolerance towards therapeutic clotting factors. This is a basic research project that will be developed in an animal model (mouse).
If results are promising, the project will be further developed to clinical studies. If Vanessa´s basic research is successful, it may help to improve the efficacy of current treatments. The project will be fully developed in Portugal, at the IMM's Cellular Immunology Unit, led by researcher Luis Graca.
The IMM's Cellular Immunology Unit has been developing cutting edge research in the area of immune-mediated diseases, such as asthma, transplantation and autoimmunity. The Unit's research has already resulted in the formation of a star-up company to develop a novel therapy to prevent liver transplant rejection.
Title of the project: "Boosting dendritic cell function to facilitate tolerance induction to recombinant clotting factor"
Notes for the editor
About Bayer Hemophilia Awards and Bayer
Since 2002, Bayer Hemophilia Awards (BHA) has funded researchers, medical doctors and health professionals to improve treatment and education in hemophilia. The programme has already funded 176 candidates whose projects resulted in 82 publications and 100 abstracts and includes 4 categories:
- Special Project Award supports basic research projects
- Early Career Investigator Award supports middle career researchers to lead a research project
- Caregiver Award supports health professionals such as nurses and therapists working in hemophilia treatment.
- Clinical Training Award supports extra training to medical doctors wishing to pursue a career in hemophilia.
Annually, the programme awards 5 Special Project Awards, 5 Early Career Investigator Awards, 6 Caregiver Awards and 4 Clinical Training Awards.
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About Instituto de Medicina Molecular and the team
Instituto de Medicina Molecular (IMM) is a reference biomedical research centre in Portugal, having acquired the special status of Associate laboratory of the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Technology. IMM's mission is to promote basic, translational and clinical biomedical research with the aim to understand the mechanisms of disease and develop novel therapeutic approaches. The recent creation of the Academic Medical Centre of Lisbon gathers in a single consortium the Institute of Molecular Medicine, The Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon and the Hospital de Santa Maria with the aim of developing an integrated perspective of medicine, fostering the transversal biomedical research, from the bench to the clinic.
Vanessa Oliveira is post doctoral researchers at the Cellular Immunology Unit since 2006. She has obtained her PhD from the Oxford University, UK (2006). Her research has focused on the use of monoclonal antibodies to induce immune tolerance.
Luis Graca is a medical doctor and researcher, currently Director of the Cellular Immunology Unit of Instituto de Medicina Molecular and Assistant Professor of Immunology at the Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon University. Luis Graca obtained his PhD from Oxford University, UK, in 2002 and has developed post-doctoral research in Oxford, UK, and Perth, Australia. The research team led by Luis Graca at IMM focuses on the study of cellular mechanisms in immune tolerance, with the aim of reprogramming the immune system in immune-mediated diseases such as asthma, transplant rejection and autoimmunity.