Vanessa Cardoso, assistant researcher at the Center for Research in Electromechanical Microsystems (CMEMS) at EEUM, was at the Tec2Med Summit, representing the University of Minho.

The congress had as its theme “Action over Reaction | Building Preventive Healthcare Systems” and took place on the 10th and 11th of October, at the Lusófona University, in Lisbon.

The researcher coordinates the Radio4Breast project, an initiative that aims to develop personalized cellular models of breast cancer.

For Vanessa Cardoso, this year’s theme, “Action instead of Reaction | Building Preventive Health Systems”, “couldn’t be closer to what drives our work. I had the honor of giving an invited lecture in the Precision Medicine and Personalized Therapies session: “One Tumor, One Plan: the next leap in personalized radiotherapy”. Nowadays, radiotherapy is extraordinarily accurate at the place where it administers the dose, but we still do not routinely measure how each patient’s tumor and healthy tissue will respond. In our FCT Radio4Breast project, together with IPO Porto, we are developing breast models on a chip to help bridge this gap, with the first experiments carried out on the same clinical machines that treat patients. The goal: to move radiotherapy from reactive to proactive. I am very proud of these young researchers and grateful to all those who made this work possible at CMEMS, CEB, LABBELS, 2C2T and IPO Porto.”

Tec2Med is a global platform that brings together clinicians, researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs and students to accelerate innovation in healthcare. The Tec2Med Summit is the pioneering event in Portugal to unite, in an environment of ideation, clinicians and engineers since 2019.