Mariana Bento

Visiting Scientist

Mariana completed her Masters degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences (PharmD) from the Faculdade de Farmacia, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, in 2020. After that she worked as a Pharmacist. In 2018, Mariana joined the BioNanoSciences group, at iMed.Ulisboa as undergraduate student, and ever since, she has been working on the formulation and characterization of polymeric nanoparticles as tools for cancer vaccines. Now she is a PhD student at the same group and she is focused on the development of a nano-immunotherapy for Pancreatic Cancer, combining cancer vaccines with modulators of the tumor microenvironment.

She was awarded a Otto Bayer Fellowship to do an internship at the Micro-Organo Lab, where she is working on a pancreatic cancer -on-chip model to understand the crosstalk between tumor cells, immune cells and vasculature. Her goal is to characterize the impact of the nano-immunotherapy on the this cancer model, to facilitate the further in vivo studies.

In her free times, Mariana loves photography and to discover new places. She also likes to read and to learn languages.