Ângela Fernandes, a post-doctoral researcher at Pinho’s Lab, has been awarded with one of the prestigious 2025 Maria de Sousa grants. Ângela’s project will focus on neoantigen glycosylation in colorectal cancer – a type of cancer that remains particularly resistant to immunotherapies.
In our most recent publication in Cancer Immunology Research, we describe how T cell glycosylation mediates T cell exhaustion in colorectal cancer and how engineering of the T cell glycome can boost the anti-tumor activity of CD8+ and CAR-T cells.
Eduarda Leite-Gomes, a PhD Student from Pinho’s Lab, has recently been awarded with a short-term fellowship from the Federation of European Biochemical Societies.
Pedro Cabral and Ana Campar have recently been awarded by NEDAI (Núcleo de Estudos de Doenças Auto-Imunes) at its XI National Congress, which also marked the XXX Annual Meeting of Autoimmunity in Portugal. Each was distinguished by their pioneering work in lupus nephritis and idiopathic inflammatory myopathies, respectively.
Pinho’s Lab has recently published a landmark study on colitis-associated colorectal cancer (CAC) in the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis! Therein, we demonstrate that a progressive increase in N-glycan branching at the T cell surface not only accompanies CAC development but also debilitates T cell function during carcinogenesis.
Pinho´s Lab was honoured to receive the Best Paper Award 2025 at the Annual Meeting of the Portuguese Society for Immunology (SPI – Sociedade Portuguesa de Imunologia), which took place in Lisbon last April.
Pinho’s Lab has recently been distinguished by the Mizutani Foundation for Glycoscience, receiving funding for a groundbreaking research project dedicated to harnessing glycans to improve immunotherapies for colorectal cancer (CRC).
Catarina Azevedo, Srishti Shah and Rafaela Nogueira – PhD students from Pinho’s lab – have recently been awarded with Travel Grants from the European Federation for Immunological Sciences (EFIS)! In addition, Catarina Azevedo awarded EMBO and SPI grants for a research secondment in Switzerland.
Our latest publication, published in the journal Gut Microbes, delves into how the glycosylation of the gut mucosa impacts the crosstalk between microbiota and immune cells in the context of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
