Cells capable of giving rise to new metastases may circulate in the blood of a cancer patient. They are rare and difficult to study in laboratory conditions. Understanding how these cells grow and respond to therapies requires overcoming a key challenge in biomedical research: managing to expand them outside the body. This is the starting point of the project led by Nuno Bernardes, a professor and researcher at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, who has been distinguished by the 11th edition of the Gilead Génese Programme on 11 March 2026. The initiative recognises innovative projects in health research and community intervention in Portugal.
“Circulating tumour cells are cancer cells that have managed to breach the natural barriers of their tissue of origin and enter the bloodstream”, explains Nuno Bernardes. “These cells can act as seeds for metastatic tumours in distant organs and are key to understanding how metastasis develops”.
The award-winning project, RAPID-CTCs – “Maximizing the ex vivo expansion of circulating tumor cells with agitation-based platforms towards personalized oncology”, is being carried out at the Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences (IBB), a research unit affiliated with Técnico. The work focuses on the laboratory growth of circulating tumour cells, seeking to deepen understanding of disease progression and contribute to more effective and personalised treatment approaches.
In addition to their role in disease progression, “the biological profile of tumour cells [circulating in each patient] can provide very important clues for determining the best therapeutic approach for each patient”, says the researcher. This knowledge can help “avoid treatments with a lower probability of success and potential adverse effects, which is often the case with certain chemotherapies”, he adds.
Working with these cells presents, however, significant technical difficulties. Isolated from peripheral blood samples, they occur in very small numbers. “With so few cells to begin with, it is very difficult to grow them in the laboratory until we have a sufficient quantity for drug resistance studies that can be translated, in a timely manner, into decisions about the best therapeutic approach for each patient”, he explains.
To address this challenge, the RAPID-CTCs project is testing new cell culture strategies. “We want to explore how the use of agitation-based platforms, which provide greater control over the variables affecting cell growth, can help us obtain sufficient cells more quickly for therapeutic studies”, says the researcher. This approach contrasts with many existing studies that rely on animal models and require longer periods to generate an adequate number of cells.
For Nuno Bernardes, the recognition highlights the work on bioengineering applied to health carried out at Técnico. “In this project, we aim to extend this know-how to circulating tumour cells from breast cancers”, he says. Overcoming the difficulty of expanding these cells in laboratory conditions is an essential step towards exploring their clinical potential. “We hope that in the future, more effective therapeutic approaches can be designed based on the data obtained through the optimised expansion of these cells”.
A total of 47 national projects were submitted to the 11th edition of the Gilead Genesis Programme, including 26 research projects and 21 community intervention initiatives. From these applications, 10 projects were selected – four in the “research” category and six in the “community intervention” category – with a total of €300,000 in funding to support initiatives addressing HIV, chronic viral hepatitis and oncology. “We want to remain an active partner in research and the community, contributing to a more equitable, innovative and people-centred healthcare ecosystem, both today and in the future,” says María Río, Vice President & General Manager for Spain & Portugal Gilead Sciences.
