An institution built for connection

The Champalimaud Foundation (CF) has the advantage of housing a research institute and a clinic under the same roof. Collaboration opportunities are everywhere, and from the start Henrique Veiga-Fernandes made the most of them. He's been linking research and clinic, collaborating with health professionals, and hopes to expand these while inspiring others to do the same.

Henrique first heard about the CF when it was still based at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, waiting for its new building to be constructed. At the time, he was returning to Portugal from London to start his lab at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular (now the GIMM Foundation), but the CF was already on his radar. In 2017, his lab moved to the CF and his story as a group leader there began.

Once moved in, Henrique was surprised by the building itself. “It was very different from most research buildings, where labs often have almost no natural light. Stepping into this space, with all that light and openness, was striking,” he says. He remembers the day they moved in: “We had the lab up and running in 24 hours, and it was brilliant. Everyone, including me, was installing fridges, setting up equipment, and stocking supplies.” He recalls those first days as a moment of real teamwork and how rewarding it was to see the group’s cohesion.

Henrique also helped create the Cancer and Physiology Programme at the CF. He remembers finding similarities with colleagues from the Neuroscience programme and the Clinic, and learning a shared language. “In a way, you try to bring your language closer to others. Instead of insisting on differences, you look for common ground,” he says. “Watching a community grow and sharing so much scientifically isn’t easy, but we’ve built a very interesting one.”

Discussing collaborations between research and the clinic led us back to the building. Henrique calls it, “the biggest advantage but also the biggest challenge,” since sharing a space doesn’t automatically mean sharing a mindset. “It’s a challenge that, as long as both sides are flexible and open, can be handled more easily than it seems.” But the architecture does help, “you actually get to know clinicians and vice versa. From casual encounters over coffee to joint seminars, both create an environment that’s naturally good for collaboration.”

These encounters have already brought results. Henrique’s lab studies how organs influence the immune system and communicate in the context of disease. Consequently, working with the gastroenterologists from the Champalimaud Clinical Centre's Digestive Unit was always in the back of his mind. “It was a natural partnership. We were already working on gut immunity, so sitting down with clinicians to discuss ideas made perfect sense.”

From those talks came the idea of looking at a surgical technique already used in humans for fatty liver disease, which ablates intestinal cells central to immune and metabolic regulation, to see whether their animal findings applied to humans. Collaborating allowed them to validate the animal results in human samples, and “that’s priceless and absolutely extraordinary,” Henrique says. He smiles remembering when he asked clinician Ricardo Rio-Tinto if he could observe a biopsy. “It was something I insisted on. Watching how they collected the samples was really rewarding and informative.” They were struggling with sample size, so Henrique wanted to understand how to improve it. “The clinician’s openness saying, ‘of course, whenever you want, we’ll organise it’, made me really grateful.”

Henrique sees this as part of a new age of collaboration. When he started doing research, disciplines were still pretty much in boxes: the neuroscientists, the immunologists, the cell biologists. “Those barriers are breaking down. The most interesting unknowns live at the borders between disciplines. We need knowledge from all sides, including clinicians who frame problems differently from researchers”. We also briefly talked about collaborations with innovators and entrepreneurs, whose perspectives can help bring discoveries into medical use, and that Henrique finds important. 

Besides the close contact with doctors, Henrique also talked about the proximity with patients.  “We see patients all day long, so it’s inevitable to feel that presence, and it reminds us why we’re here,” he says. And this presence is essential for pushing Henrique and his lab to keep researching. “Fundamental research exists to discover the unknown, and that’s incredibly important”, he explains. This research forms the foundation for future clinical discoveries, even if not immediately translatable, and that is something important to highlight.

We finished our conversation talking about what makes the CF special for Henrique. Inevitably, we went back to the building,“there’s something at the heart of this community tied to how we inhabit the space. These are spaces of extreme beauty, they breathe with the environment. When it rains, you feel it. When it’s hot, you feel it in the light that comes in. And that’s extraordinary, because the people who work here have that constant connection to what’s happening outside, we’re not sealed off”. 

And I think this perfectly sums up our conversation and the spirit of the CF, a welcoming and open community where science and medicine grow together to advance discovery.
 

Henrique Veiga-Fernandes, Investigador Principal, Immunophysiology Lab, Champalimaud Foundation.

Text by Ana Rita P. Mendes, Communication & Events Manager of the Champalimaud Foundation's Communication, Event & Outreach Team

Full 20 Years, 20 Stories Collection here.