Romeu Viana defended his PhD thesis in Biotechnology and Biosciences, titled “In silico cross-species approach for the discovery of new antifungal drug targets and new antifungal drugs”, on the 29th of July 2024, at Instituto Superior Técnico.
During the previous four years, under the supervision of Miguel Cacho Teixeira from iBB-Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences and in collaboration with Oscar Dias, CEB-Universidade do Minho, Claudio M Soares, ITQB NOVA, and Luis Schang, Cornell University, Romeu constructed computational tools to unveil, at the genomic scale, unique metabolic features of pathogenic yeasts and to identify new drug targets, guiding antifungal drug discovery.
The used tools, as well as the reached lists of promising new targets and potential antifungal molecules, support the proposal of a new drug discovery pipeline, in the crossroad between in silico screening and experimental validation.
