Melanie Aguiar is a PhD student in the Health Sciences Doctoral Program of School of Medicine at University of Minho. Her project entitled “Exploiting the immune landscape of HOXA9/WNT6-driven glioblastoma: opportunities for novel precision therapies” is supervised by Dr. Bruno M. Costa and intends to investigate the immune landscapes at spatial resolution and assess the transcriptomic and immune signatures at near-single cell level to uncover targeted therapies and potential prognostic biomarkers leading to improved patient outcomes.
She concluded a Master´s degree in Cancer Biology from Imperial College London having developed a dissertation on the mechanisms of resistance to CDK4/6 inhibitors using CRISPR Gene Activation and the modulation of RNA binding to hnRNPA1 by Fibroblast Growth Factor stimulation.
MA spent portions of her career in both medical academia and pharmaceutical industry, first at the Southwest Dementia Brain Bank (SWDBB) part of University of Bristol, then at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), University College London (UCL) Cancer Institute and Champalimaud Foundation.
She co-authored publications in peer-reviewed journals including Blood and Lancet Haematology and contributed with posters at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy and The European Haematology Association.
MA is mainly interested in the study of the heterogenous and immunosuppressive microenvironment of glioblastoma and to identify prognostic biomarkers and novel therapeutic strategies and their possible translation into patient care.