Palestrante: João Pedro de Magalhães (Instituto do Envelhecimento e Doenças Crónicas, Universidade de Liverpool, Reino Unido)
Data: 28 Maio 2018
Hora: 17h
Local: Auditório Principal da ESB
Seminário em português, gratuito e aberto ao público, sem necessidade de inscrição prévia
Resumo
People have always sought eternal life and everlasting youth. Although the causes of ageing remains largely mysterious, hundreds of genes are now known to regulate ageing in model organisms. Genes can increase longevity by up to 10 fold and retard the process of ageing as a whole in animal models. Applying this knowledge to improve human health would have huge benefits. Besides, lifespan varies dramatically between similar species: mice die of old age at 3-4 years of age, dogs cannot live more than 30 years, yet humans can live over 100 years and some animals can live even longer. Studies of species with exceptional longevity or disease resistance, like naked mole rats that are resistant to cancer or bowhead whales that live over 200 years, may help treat and prevent human diseases.
Biografia
I graduated in Microbiology from the Escola Superior de Biotecnologia in my hometown of Porto, Portugal, in 1999. My first experience in a research environment was as an intern (1998-1999) in the UnIGENe research group at the Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology in Porto, where I worked on Machado-Joseph disease, a neurological disorder.
As a doctoral fellow, I pursued my dream of unravelling the mechanisms of ageing by joining the Ageing and Stress Group at the University of Namur in Belgium. With Olivier Toussaint as my advisor, my work from 1999 to 2004 spanned molecular mechanisms of cellular senescence and responses to oxidative stress, evolutionary models of ageing, and analyses of gene networks.
Fascinated by the genome and by the opportunities its sequencing opened, I then did a postdoc from 2004 to 2008 with genomics pioneer George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. Succinctly, we developed high-throughput approaches for studying ageing, including computational tools and databases, statistical models of mortality, methods for cell-based RNAi screens, and comparative genomics methods for investigating the evolution of longevity.
In 2008, I joined the University of Liverpool to develop my own group on genomic approaches to ageing. Our group was initially in the School of Biological Sciences (which later became the Institute of Integrative Biology), and is now in the Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease. We are world-leaders in employing genomics and bioinformatics to study ageing with pioneering work in sequencing and analyzing genomes from long-lived species. We have dozens of collaborators around world and collaborate with biotech companies and nonprofit organizations. I am also an affiliate Principal Investigator in the Neuroendocrinology and Aging Group at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. Please browse this website for more information about our work.