Mariana Brandão has obtained a Master Degree in Medicine, by the University of Porto, Portugal, in 2010. She has done her general residency program in 2011 and then underwent a residency program on Medical Oncology from 2012 to 2017, at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology of Porto. As part of her training, she had a short clinical fellowship at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, UK. She has become a Medical Oncology specialist in October 2017.
Afterwards, she moved to Institut Jules Bordet, in Brussels, Belgium, for a clinical research fellowship that lasted until December 2020. She worked on the design and reviewing of clinical trials synopsis and/or protocols, protocols amendments and any other trial-related documents as a medical advisor. Additionally, she developed other clinical research projects, generating original data and wrote systematic reviews and classic reviews, among other projects. Moreover, she has started a translational project regarding the impact of HIV infection in patients with breast cancer.
She has concluded her PhD on Public Health in may 2021 at the University of Porto. Within the aim of her PhD project, she has been in Mozambique several times since 2015, working on the assembly and study of the first prospective cohort of breast cancer patients in the country – the Moza-BC cohort. She studied the distribution of breast cancer subtypes, and its impact in etiology, clinical management and survival.
She has also been working with a cohort of breast cancer patients at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology of Porto (the NEON-BC cohort), studying the relationship between the biological and socio-economic heterogeneity among breast cancer patients and its implications on health care expenditure.
Since January 2021 that she is working as a Medical Oncology consultant at the Institut Jules Bordet, performing both clinical and research activities at the Thoracic Oncology Unit. She is currently developing a clinical trial on the application of liquid biopsy to the detection of molecular alterations in patients with advanced lung tumors.
