Marta Costa is a Researcher working at the ICVS, Founder and CEO of Karion Therapeutics, a spin-off company dedicated to the pre-clinical development of innovative drug candidates for cancer. She holds a degree in Applied Chemistry (2006, UM) and a PhD in Sciences – Organic Chemistry (2011). During this work she was awarded a PhD grant from the Portuguese Science Foundation. Marta has experience working as a Medicinal Chemist in a pharmaceutical company (Bial, 2011) and has also postdoctoral experience at the Chemistry Department at the UM (2012-2014), working in organic synthesis and also in teaching under-graduated students. Marta joined the ICVS in 2015 and in the last years focused her interest on the study of new synthetic compounds as anticancer agents. She is particularly interested in developing disruptive therapies, especially for triple negative breast cancer and renal cell carcinoma, two poor prognosis cancers with high mortality rates. Marta has published several international peer-reviewed research articles, book chapters and she is the major inventor of 2 international patents (WO/2020/261242; WO/2021/191882). She successfully supervised 1 PhD, 10 Master theses and several under-graduated research projects and supervises currently 5 PhD and 2 Master students. Marta has been actively participating in the training of MSc and PhD, through training programs held at the School of Medicine/ICVS. She has been acknowledged with several awards, including the Innovation Award Bluepharma|University of Coimbra (2022), 2 research grants from the National League Against Cancer (LPCC-NRN, 2019 and 2022) and by a European Regional Development Fund (FEDER, 2020).