NOVA Medical School participates in debate “The Future of Neurosciences”

Researchers and Professors from NOVA Medical School, Miguel Xavier and Cláudia Almeida, participated in the conference organized by Jornal Económico and Biogen Portugal.

11-May-2023

Cláudia Almeida (second from the right) at a panel in the congress "O Futuro das Neurociências"

Last May 9, the conference “The Future of Neurosciences” took place at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon, with the support of Jornal Económico and Biogen Portugal. Miguel Xavier, Deputy Director and President of the Scientific Council of NOVA Medical School and director of the National Program for Mental Health of the Directorate-General for Health (DGS), and Cláudia Almeida, principal investigator of NMS Research, were two of the participants in this meeting where discussed challenges and solutions for brain health research areas.

“Mental health has lived years and years under rocks due to fear of the unknown”, said Miguel Xavier, also a psychiatrist and clinical researcher. "We are in a media hypervisibility phase", then describing the work he has been doing with his team within the framework of the National Program for Mental Health of DGS, namely collecting funding from the State Budget to be applied in the area of mental health and gain visibility as a public health priority.

Cláudia Almeida, the researcher who leads the Neuronal Traffic in Aging laboratory and who has made numerous contributions to advancing knowledge of the fundamental mechanisms of Alzheimer's Disease, said that "most researchers are trying to understand how to identify patients at an early stage; what causes Alzheimer's disease, identifying biomarkers, doing a psychological assessment, detecting blood signs”. She also spoke of the work being done to understand the mechanisms, namely in the rarer forms caused by mutations, which can be introduced in experimental models to better study the disease.

You can read the full news articles on the Jornal Económico website 1 2