Bruno Silva Santos
Bruno Silva-Santos is a Full Professor and Director of Immuno-Oncology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, and Group Leader at the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine (GIMM) in Lisbon, Portugal. He is also the current President of the Portuguese Society for Immunology (SPI). He obtained his PhD in Immunology from University College London in 2002 for work developed with Michael Owen at Cancer Research UK (The London Research Institute), and then trained as a post-doc with Adrian Hayday at King’s College London, before establishing his own group in Lisbon in 2006. His research, which has been funded, among others, by the European Research Council (ERC) and the la Caixa Foundation, is mostly dedicated to gamma-delta T cells, having dissected novel molecular mechanisms of their differentiation and tumor cell recognition, published in over 120 papers in top international peer-reviewed journals. In 2019, Bruno Silva-Santos was elected Member of European Molecular Organization (EMBO) in recognition of his scientific contributions. His translational work on Immuno-Oncology was further recognized with awards from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Janssen and Bial; and the nomination as Honorary Member of the European Academy of Tumor Immunology. His patented work on “Delta One T (DOT) cells” also constituted the basis for a start-up company focused on cancer immunotherapy, Lymphact, whose proprietary technology has been acquired by Takeda Pharmaceutical and is currently under clinical testing in 3 centers the USA.
