Rita Caridade

Visiting PhD student

Rita Caridade Silva graduated in Applied Biology at the University of Minho in 2019. During this time, she has performed a bachelor's internship project in the field of oncology, studying the biological effect of RKIP expression in lung adenocarcinoma at the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS). In this work, she had the chance to learn and develop a multidisciplinary technical profile, including cell culture techniques, western blot, cell viability, proliferation assays, and cell migration studies (wound-healing assay). After that, from 2019 to 2021, she enrolled in the Master's program in Health Sciences at the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS), School of Medicine, University of Minho. At the end of 2019, she did a laboratory rotation in the Neurosciences Research Domain (ICVS) under the supervision of Dr. Fábio Teixeira, exploring the combinatorial potential of stem cells secretome (SCS) and Safinamide for Parkinson's disease (PD) treatment. Following this, at the beginning of 2020, she received appropriate training in laboratory animal science by attending a course that follows the Federation for European Laboratory Animal Sciences Associations (FELASA) recommendations (category C), which currently allows her to work with laboratory animals for research purposes. In 2021, she completed her MSc dissertation entitled "Combining Stem Cells Secretome (SCS) and N-acetylcysteine (NAC) to Parkinson's Disease modeling and repair" under Dr. Fábio Teixeira and Dr. António Salgado's supervision. Her research work focused on the development of a novel combinatorial therapeutic strategy for PD modeling and repair, using a stem cell-free-based approach and a potential neuroprotective PD drug. The results found NAC as modulators of brain repair, given its capacity to promote neuroprotection and signaling pathways modulation, thereby contributing to dopaminergic integrity preservation. From January 2022 to December 2022, she joined Dr. Fábio Teixeira's group as a research fellow under the project entitled "Focused Ultrasound combined with Stem Cells Secretome and Pharmacotherapies: establishing a Multimodal path for Parkinson's disease repair" exploring the impact of combinatory multimodal drugs and magnetic resonance (MRI)-guided focused ultrasound (FUS) on blood-brain barrier transient openings to the precise delivery of pharmacological strategies in Parkinson's disease-affected brain areas. Accordingly, she undertook a 4-month lab rotation at NeuroSpin (France), acquiring skills in MRI-guided focused ultrasound (FUS) and combined drug delivery techniques for Parkinson's disease. Currently, she is a PhD student in the Biomedicine doctoral program at the Faculty of Medicine (FMUP), University of Porto. She began her PhD scholarship funded by FCT in January 2023, and is now focusing on her PhD project titled "Repurposing Multimodal Strategies for Parkinson’s Disease: Creating the Path for Disease Delay and Repair." Her research interests lie in discovering innovative treatment approaches for Parkinson's Disease. Throughout her dedicated work, she successfully published a total of five papers in peer-reviewed journals, with two of them as a first author (including a literature review and a results paper). Additionally, she presented her research at various international conferences such as ENCODS (awarded for poster presentation), AD/PD22 (oral presentation), IBRO (poster presentation), and AD/PD24 (poster presentation), along with a national presentation and pitch poster presentation. Recently, she received the PAPRE Prize (Programme of Support for Publication in High-Quality Scientific Journals) from the Porto Polytechnic Institute and a Travel Grant from the Portuguese Society for Neuroscience (SPN).