First Achilles Conference and FoReCaST Second Workshop

First Achilles Conference
“Molecular and biological mechanisms of tendon homeostasis and repair”
Fundação Dr. António Cupertino de Miranda (FACM), Porto, Portugal
08 | 10 July 2019

This conference is being organized in the scope of the European Horizon 2020 Twinning project ACHILLES: Overcoming specific weaknesses in tendon biology to design advanced regenerative therapies. In the framework of this project, a series of International Conferences will be organized in the upcoming years. The First Achilles Conference will focus on Molecular and biological mechanisms of tendon homeostasis and repair. The event is organized to promote a close interaction between highly skilled experts in the field with students and young researchers interested in key aspects of tendon development, disease and regeneration.

FoReCaST Second Workshop
“Nanotechnology in cancer detection and treatment: from the lab to the clinic”
Fundação Dr. António Cupertino de Miranda (FACM), Porto, Portugal
11 | 12 July 2019

The majority of the in vitro models only involve a single tumour cell population, which represents a small fraction of the tumour development and integrative cell network. Therefore, a new dimension in cancer research has to be developed: the 3D microenvironment. Thus, the FoReCaST project intend to create in vitro 3D cancer study models, which will copycat the complexity and hierarchically organization of natural ECM of tumour cells found in vivo. In this context, 3B’s-UMINHO will strategically use the knowledge gained during the last ~20years in the fields of biomaterials sciences and tissue engineering, and five new complementary research topics are being implemented to consolidate this new research topic within the following topics:

RL1 - Metabolic glycoengineering for tumour imaging;
RL2 - Bioinformatics;
RL3 - Cell engineering;
RL4 - Nanotechnologies;
RL5 - Cell signalling