{"id":168247,"date":"2014-12-29T17:32:16","date_gmt":"2014-12-29T19:32:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=168247"},"modified":"2015-03-25T15:19:19","modified_gmt":"2015-03-25T18:19:19","slug":"the-formation-of-a-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-formation-of-a-school\/","title":{"rendered":"The formation of a school"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Enlarged

Sheila Terry \/ Science Photo Library <\/span>Enlarged heart: a consequence of hypertension, which in 30% of cases does not respond to drug therapySheila Terry \/ Science Photo Library <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Dr. Eduardo Moacyr Krieger, 86, of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo School of Medicine (FMUSP), is enthusiastic about the preliminary results of a recent study in which he is participating: an analysis of about 2,000 patients with hypertension from all over the Brazil. The goal is to find out what proportion of them are resistant to the treatment for high blood pressure. In developed countries, up to 30% of patients fall into this category.<\/p>\n

The good news: \u201cThe response of Brazilian patients to the treatment for hypertension has been really spectacular. The percentage of those with resistant hypertension is very low compared to the international average, provided that the patient receives all the necessary care. It is something comparable to the best results obtained in other countries. This will be very useful as a standard for the Unified Health System (SUS),\u201d says Krieger, who cannot yet reveal the exact percentage because it is a multi-center study with 26 participating institutions.<\/p>\n

Krieger\u2019s career and that of other scientists of his generation, many still active, is illustrative of the transformations and the considerable advances in biomedical research that have been made at Brazil\u2019s largest university. From modest beginnings, when USP researchers had to face challenges of infrastructure and public health or political persecution during the military regime, the university has been able to form groups that are carrying out ambitious projects of scientific and social impact, working in cutting edge areas such as cell therapy and personalized medicine.<\/p>\n

Inspired by Buenos Aires<\/strong>
\nAn interesting aspect of their origin is that many of the USP biomedical research groups received their inspiration and encouragement from Argentine researchers, who were already renowned as physiologists in the middle of the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

Among these figures was the first Argentine\u2014and first Latin American\u2014to receive a Nobel Prize for his achievements as a scientist: Bernardo Alberto Houssay (1887-1971), who won in 1947 for his work on the hormonal regulation of blood sugar levels. Under a program sponsored by the Brazilian Federal Agency for the Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (Capes), the Argentine laureate and his colleagues visited Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul State) in 1954. That’s when Krieger, a newly minted doctor, met Eduardo Braun Men\u00e9ndez one of the disciples of the Nobel laureate, and was invited to spend a few months in Buenos Aires working with the team.<\/p>\n

\"Trypanosoma

Luciana Lima \/ ICB-USP<\/span>Trypanosoma cruzi<\/em> under the microscope: its proliferative form (smaller circles)<\/em> within a cell\u2026Luciana Lima \/ ICB-USP<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The environment had to be improvised. Because of his opposition to the Argentine military regime, Houssay and his colleagues had been expelled from the University of Buenos Aires and forced to establish the Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine in a house provided by Men\u00e9ndez\u2019s wealthy family\u2014a different laboratory in every room. But the intellectual fervor of that environment was so great, according to Krieger, that he fell in love with basic research and decided to deepen his understanding of the fundamentals of the cardiovascular system.<\/p>\n

But the Argentine connection does not end there. Dr. Miguel Covian, another member of Dr. Houssay\u2019s group, was invited to join the Ribeir\u00e3o Preto Medical School, established in 1951 by a S\u00e3o Paulo doctor, Zeferino Vaz, with a mission to become an institution dedicated to research. Since he knew Krieger from Buenos Aires, Covian called him to Ribeir\u00e3o Preto, where the young doctor settled in 1957.<\/p>\n

\u201cI usually say that I became a physiologist only because I worked with a Nobel laureate in physiology,\u201d says Krieger. \u201cThis kind of leadership in research is fundamental to one’s career because, after all, you learn science from those who know it, not from reading a book in the library. The training of a scientist is still very much like learning a craft: you start as an apprentice. And these great personalities are the ones who are enthusiastic and persuasive and who create a kind of genealogical chain of researchers.\u201d Coincidentally, with regard to the genealogy itself\u2014not the metaphorical, involving teachers and students, but the literal, from father to son\u2014the Argentine doctor also inspired Krieger\u2019s son, Jos\u00e9 Eduardo Krieger to follow in his footsteps. He now heads the Genetics and Molecular Cardiology Laboratory of the Heart Institute (InCor).<\/p>\n

DNA\u00a0revolutions<\/strong>
\nIndeed, the atmosphere of that time both inside and outside the state capital involved some common ingredients. One of the most important was what you might call the first revolutionary phase of molecular biology, explains Dr. Erney Plessmann de Camargo, 79, a parasitologist at USP’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, who in the early 1970s, in a nod to university reform, brought together teachers and researchers from several of the university\u2019s basic science departments. Formerly scattered throughout various USP faculties, specialties such as histology, parasitology, immunology and physiology, in addition to others that today are the source of significant scientific production at the international level, migrated to the Institute on the main campus in the S\u00e3o Paulo neighborhood of Butant\u00e3.<\/p>\n

\"\u2026

Luciana Lima \/ ICB-USP<\/span>\u2026 and its extracellular form, with flagellum, in blood from an infected mouseLuciana Lima \/ ICB-USP<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Camargo, who has done major work on the biology of\u00a0Trypanosoma cruzi<\/em>, the parasite that causes Chagas disease, cites several seminal discoveries that, during the 1950s and 1960s, seemed to finally be revealing the secrets of how life works from the standpoint of its molecular bases: the discovery of the famous double helix structure of DNA; the process of energy production in mitochondria, the \u201cpower plants\u201d of cells; how proteins are produced in ribosomes. \u201cThe circumstances were very favorable for becoming interested in science, and we had great teachers to show that to us,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

According to Camargo, another reason he was attracted to parasitology was political: almost all the researchers involved in the field were politically left-leaning. \u201cWe were the red department of the School of Medicine,\u201d he jokes. Among his leftist colleagues were Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva, who died in 2014 and was a little older than Camargo, and Professor Samuel Pess\u00f4a, a friend of military officer and communist leader Luis Carlos Prestes. The association between political engagement and the parasitology department, then located at the Medical School headquarters in the neighborhood of Pinheiros, was logical for many of these researchers, if one considers the link between poverty and serious diseases caused by parasites. \u201cProfessor Pess\u00f4a said he wanted to solve the problems of the Brazilian people,\u201d says Camargo.<\/p>\n

If this view served to stimulate the scientific production of the group, it also placed its members in harm\u2019s way following the military coup of 1964. Several USP parasitologists were stripped of their political rights by the new regime, including Camargo. Both he and Pereira da Silva would later be arrested. Camargo would not return permanently to USP until the 1980s, welcomed at an event attended by about 200 people that served as the university\u2019s way of making amends to the formerly persecuted parasitologist.<\/p>\n

To Camargo, although today’s university environment at times seems less politicized than the 1960s, the differences are not as great as one might think. \u201cI do not believe that the intellectual and political structure of the scientific community has changed significantly since then. What changed greatly were the circumstances: the end of the specter of the Cold War, the end of the physical and cultural oppression when the military regime collapsed, and the continuing, though slow, humanization of capitalism. I’m fairly certain that if some kind of oppression were to return, the non-conformism of the scientific community would also return, and would again be called subversive,\u201d he argues.<\/p>\n

Camargo is now engaged in trying to understand, in a broad sense, the evolutionary history of the trypanosomatids group, as it relates to causing Chagas disease. A wide variety of vertebrates, from fish to reptiles, are affected by these creatures, not only transmitted by insects known popularly as o barbeiro<\/em> (the kissing bug), but also by ticks and leeches. Being able to study this fascinating evolutionary trajectory is, in part, a measure of the success of parasitology, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe parasitology of my early career had incredible sanitary and socio-political challenges linked to malaria, Chagas disease, schistosomiasis and diseases caused by other vermin. It was, quite correctly, a parasitology directed toward human diseases. Today, these problems are not on the same scale as at other times, nevertheless parasitology has become a very important branch of natural history, since parasites constitute the largest group of living things on the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

From bench to bedside<\/strong>
\nAt about the time Krieger was becoming established in Ribeir\u00e3o Preto, the duo formed by Drs. Maur\u00edcio Rocha e Silva (who died in 1983) and S\u00e9rgio Henrique Ferreira, now 80, did work that would become the basis for some of the first effective drugs for reducing hypertension. They analyzed, for example, how substances found in the venom of the Bothrops jararaca (pit viper) affects bradykinin, a molecule produced naturally by the body.<\/p>\n

Later, Ferreira would explain the mechanism by which substances such as aspirin and morphine combat pain and inflammation. Today, younger colleagues of Ferreira at USP in Ribeir\u00e3o Preto, like Fernando de Queiroz Cunha, are continuing this work in order to tackle diseases involving inflammatory mechanisms, such as sepsis (generalized infection), rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could say that Mauricio Rocha e Silva is my scientific \u2018grandfather\u2019 and Sergio Ferreira is my \u2018father,\u2019 \u201d says Cunha, returning to the genealogy metaphor\u2014Ferreira in this case was his doctoral advisor.<\/p>\n

Although several USP biomedical research groups have for decades focused on the clinical applications of the findings of basic science, Cunha says the pace has picked up over the past five years, with an increasing emphasis on so-called translational research.<\/p>\n

The advantage of the Ribeir\u00e3o Preto campus in this regard, according to Cunha, is that it has a good hospital and is very active in basic research. In addition to pharmacology and immunology, groups such as the one headed by Dr. Marco Antonio Zago, current president of USP, have won distinction. Zago\u2019s group investigates hematological diseases and the use of stem cells to treat some forms of blood cancer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe issue,\u201d says Cunha, \u201cis that the Brazilian pharmaceutical industry is only now beginning to realize the importance of radical innovation. The market share controlled by Brazilian companies\u00a0 is important and robust, but until recently has focused almost exclusively on generic or similar products.\u201d Thanks in part to research-sponsoring agencies, according to Cunha, cooperation between the university and the productive sector is beginning to take hold. \u201cWe cannot expect the university to bring a new product into the market,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

An example of an initiative that may become a reality in the future is an immunobiological test developed by Cunha and his colleagues for patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Most patients with this autoimmune disease respond well to the use of methotrexate, a major anti-arthritic drug. However approximately 30% of patients do not respond to it, but this becomes clear only three to six months after the start of treatment. The test developed by the Ribeir\u00e3o team would indicate from the outset\u00a0 that methotrexate will not work for a specific patient. \u201cThis means that six months of treatment would not be wasted,\u201d he says. The team has already applied for a patent for the test and is negotiating its manufacture by Brazilian companies.<\/p>\n

The group has also made \u200b\u200bprogress on understanding sepsis, a generalized infection that can affect hospitalized patients following major surgery and is fatal in up to 50% of cases in Brazil. Sepsis is a complex phenomenon. Part of the risk it poses to health comes from the fact that, at some stage, signals of the immune system become confused and \u201ctired,\u201d thereby preventing it from effectively attacking the bacteria that cause sepsis. The Ribeir\u00e3o team has now identified a molecule that could serve as a target for new drugs that would restore that signaling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Biomedical science groups are now in the forefront ","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159],"tags":[247,232],"coauthors":[139],"class_list":["post-168247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-medicine","tag-pharmacology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168247"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=168247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}