The Champalimaud Foundation (CF) played an important role in this achievement. Not only was CF’s Systems Neuroscience Lab one of the 12 experimental labs where the large-scale recordings were carried out, but CF also hosted much of the engineering team that designed and maintained the infrastructure that made such an unprecedented dataset possible.

“This is a historic step,” says Prof. Dr. Robert Schoevers, head of psychiatry at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) and principal investigator of PsyPal. “After many months of preparation, we are thrilled to begin working directly with patients.”

Sleep disturbances in breast cancer patients undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy – designed to shrink the tumours prior to surgery – are one of the common side effects of these treatments, which can not only exacerbate other side effects, but also impact prognosis. One of the possible, non-pharmacological strategies to mitigate these disturbances is thought to be physical exercise.

Traditional manual analysis of medical reports is extremely time consuming but crucial for accurate diagnosis and effective patient screening. 

In a recently published scientific study, Luís Elvas - Health Data Engineer in the Breast Cancer Research Programme at the Champalimaud Foundation - and colleagues, have shown that fine-tunning language models can be used for automated analysis of medical reports. This approach can streamline daily clinical workflows, improve categorisation of diseases in patients and offer a tool for new clinical research analysis.

Following Episode 5 - Part 1, where we explored the hidden world of the hypothalamus and the “love hormone” oxytocin, this second part of Hedi’s conversation with neuroendocrinologist Gareth Leng takes us even deeper.

From the “love hormone” and maternal bonding, to why your brain is more like a quantum computer, discover the brain’s secret hormonal languages that drive your behaviour and keep you alive in Episode 5 (Part 1).

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths. One of the reasons for this is that it is difficult to detect and diagnose at an early stage because the currently available methods are impracticable at the population level. 

The results of the most recent European Research Council (ERC)  Advanced Grants have been announced today (June 17th). In Portugal, the ERC selected two new projects in the area of ​​life sciences, which in total will receive 5M€. 

The ERC funding, worth in total €721M, will go to 281 leading researchers across Europe. In the case of life sciences, 732 proposals were submitted and 83 were selected for funding, which represents a success rate of approximately 11%. 

From philosophical zombies and the purpose of dreaming, to measuring consciousness like temperature and why brains aren’t computers, in Episode 4 Seth unpacks the idea that our experience of reality – and of ourselves – is a kind of waking dream, a “controlled hallucination”, shaped by prediction, perception, and the body’s primal drive to stay alive.

His theory of what it means to ‘be you’ challenges how we understand perception – and turns what you thought you knew about yourself on its head.

Following intro sessions that happened at schools back in February, nearly 200 8th-grade students from Escola do Alto do Lumiar (Lisboa) and Escola Dr. Azevedo Neves (Amadora) took part in a series of hands-on/minds-on experiments at both the GIMM Foundation and Champalimaud Foundation (CF) in March.