Prof. Raghu Kalluri
After the Nanotechnology Institute, Portugal wants to have a leading Cancer Research Lab by 2010. The Research Center of the Champalimaud Foundation will open in Lisbon in 2010, an area dedicated to neuroscience and cancer. This center's mission will be to apply research results to patients of the hospital managed by the same Foundation that will then be monitored. The head of the oncology center, which will open in October 2010, Prof. Raghu Kalluri, explains that part of the building will be dedicated to the prevention and treatment.
Leonor Beleza, president of the Foundation, thinks that the crucial point in the advancement of knowledge and control of diseases is the contact between scientists and clinicians, which is the bet of the new center of the institution.
According to Kalluri, 50 percent of oncologists are medical scientists and the other half will be focused on basic research, but also in the clinic.
"Initially, the focus will be in the areas of cancer of the breast, urologic, the reproductive system, lung and skin," explains the scientist at Harvard Medical School, adding that in future we will expand to other areas.
"The central mission is to research with a propensity to treat our patients. This enables to explore innovative strategies for therapies and conduct clinical trials. "
At the clinic there will be special attention to metastases. The research will be directed to decipher the genetic and molecular mechanisms associated with it, focusing on diagnosis, prevention and treatment.
The Champalimaud Foundation will invest several million euros to start this operation in the coming years and hopes to use grants by collecting funds and EU subsidies to sustain and grow the project.
Human resources, such as oncologists and radiologists, were initially sought through advertisements in the 'New England Journal of Medicine' and in the 'Lancet', two prestigious scientific journals.
The aim is to recruit the "best of anywhere in the world," but there is also special interest in getting the best Portuguese, explains Kalluri.
Prestigious researchers like himself in charge (of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School), Lyden (Cornell University Weill College of Medicine, New York) and Kang (Princeton University) will have labs at the center.
Stressing that the main purpose of the center is "patient care, research and education", this researcher expects the three areas are combined in an effective strategy for treatment of patients.
Translated and adapted from a post of CienciaHoje.
