Mariana Hugo Silva from Portugal is a PhD student with LongActNow and SSPC at Bernal, University of Limerick who recently participated at the 71st Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.
Mariana is part of the LongActNow, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) project led by a consortium of international academic and industrial centres at: University of Limerick (UL), SSPC , Trinity College Dublin (TCD), TU Dortmund University (TUD) & The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, Belgium.
The project, awarded €1.29 million, is a unique European Industrial Doctorate (EID) initiative that aims to address the current, future and global need for the development of additional long acting (LA) drug formulations that achieve extended-release dosage forms that are stable, predictable and which can be applied across multiple and complex Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) groups.
Her project aims to develop a new generation of long-acting injectables (LAI). This means that instead of taking a particular drug in the oral form (i.e., tablet), the drug is injected, just like a vaccine. Due to the properties inherent to crystalline drug microparticles, the drug is released during a certain number of months instead of taking a daily pill.
Read the full interview at Women in Research blog: https://womeninresearchblog.wordpress.com/2022/06/25/mariana-portugal-2/