Augusto Pedro

• PhD in Biochemistry
• Junior Researcher (FCT/CEEC Agreement) at University of Aveiro

Surtos, epidemias e pandemias são responsáveis por grandes alterações económicas, políticas, e sociais, permitindo igualmente um elevado desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico. Ao longo da história, estes eventos têm-se vindo a intensificar devido ao aumento na mobilidade entre populações, o que se traduz num aumento das cadeias de transmissão de...

The emergence of biopharmaceuticals, including proteins, nucleic acids, peptides, and vaccines, revolutionized the medical field, contributing to significant advances in the prophylaxis and treatment of chronic and life-threatening diseases. However, biopharmaceuticals manufacturing involves a set of complex upstream and downstream processes, which...

Over the past few years, antibodies such as immunoglobulin G, IgG, have increased their market share as alternative therapeutics. However, their production at high purity levels is still costly due to the absence of a cost-effective platform for their recovery and purification from the complex biological media in which they are produced. This work...

Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) has been involved in a number of medical conditions including catechol-estrogen-induced cancers and a great range of cardiovascular and neuro-degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease. Currently, Parkinson's disease treatment relies on a triple prophylaxis, involving dopamine replacement by levodopa, the...

Membrane-bound catechol-O-methyltransferase (MBCOMT), present in the brain and involved in the main pathway of the catechol neurotransmitter deactivation, is linked to several types of human dementia, which are relevant pharmacological targets for new potent and nontoxic inhibitors that have been developed, particularly for Parkinson’s disease trea...

Biomedicine seeks technological solutions to tackle major diseases, while bypassing the limitations of current treatment options. The pursuit of cost-effective and safer strategies has, among others, been focused on the design and development of novel engineered materials. Ionogels are a class of composite materials consisting of an ionic liquid (I...

High quality nucleic acids (with high integrity, purity, and biological activity) have become indispensable products of modern society, both in molecular diagnosis and to be used as biopharmaceuticals. As the current methods available for the extraction and purification of nucleic acids are laborious, time-consuming, and usually rely on the use of...

Currently, the lack of reliable strategies for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer makes the identification and characterization of new therapeutic targets a pressing matter. Several studies have proposed the Six Transmembrane Epithelial Antigen of the Prostate 1 (STEAP1) as a promising therapeutic target for prostate cancer. Although structural...

The advent of biopharmaceuticals in modern medicine brought enormous benefits to the treatment of numerous human diseases and improved the well-being of many people worldwide. First introduced in the market in the early 1980s, the number of approved biopharmaceutical products has been steadily increasing, with therapeutic proteins, antibodies, and...

The efficacy of brain therapeutics is largely hampered by the presence of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), mainly due to the failure of most (bio) pharmaceuticals to cross it. Accordingly, this study aims to develop nanocarriers for targeted delivery of recombinant precursor microRNA (pre-miR-29b), foreseeing a decrease in the expression of the BACE1...

Human nucleolin (NCL) is a multifunctional protein that is involved in diverse pathological processes. Recent evidences have shown that NCL is markedly overexpressed on the surface of most human cancer cells when compared to normal cells, being overexpressed in several malignant cells. Based on the exposed, the purpose of this pilot study is to inv...

Nucleic acids are relevant biopolymers in therapy and diagnosis, for which their purity and biological activity are of crucial relevance. However, these features are difficult to achieve by cost-effective methods. Herein, we report the functionalization of a macroporous chromatographic support functionalized with an ionic liquid (IL) with remarkabl...

Protein biopharmaceuticals, among which interferon alpha-2b (IFNα-2b) that can be used in the treatment of chronic hepatitis C and hairy cell leukemia, have become an indispensable product of current medicine. However, their current high costs derived from the lack of cost-effective downstream strategies still limits their widespread use. Polymer-b...

The dysfunction of the tumor suppressor gene TP53 has been associated with the pathogenesis of the majority of the cases of cancer reported to date, leading the cell to acquire different features known as the cancer hallmarks. In normal situations, the protein p53 protects the cells against tumorigenesis. By detecting metabolic stress or DNA damage...

The advent of biopharmaceuticals in modern medicine has brought enormous benefi ts to treat chronic and life-threatening diseases while improving the well-being of humans. Proteins (including antibodies) represent a large fraction of the biopharmaceuticals market, but are still amongst the costliest options due to the lack of cost-eff ective purifi...

A growing number of compounds resulting from human activities are continuously released into the environment. Many of these compounds may pose serious environmental threats, reinforcing the need of environmental monitoring to understand their impact on the environment and on human health and to create strategies to revert these risks. Although with...

Membrane proteins (MP) constitute 20–30% of all proteins encoded by the genome of various organisms and perform a wide range of essential biological functions. However, despite they represent the largest class of protein drug targets, a relatively small number high-resolution 3D structures have been obtained yet. Membrane protein biogenesis is more...

The ubiquitous instability of RNA along with issues associated to its purity degree have been preventing its widespread use as low-cost biotherapeutics. Based on the well-known capacity of amino acids to specifically interact with RNA when used as chromatographic ligands, a set of amino-acid-based ionic liquids (AA-ILs) was herein investigated, bot...

RNA is a biopolymer of high relevance in the biopharmaceuticals field and in fundamental and applied research; however, preservation of RNA stability is still a remarkable challenge. Herein, we demonstrate the enhanced potential of aqueous solutions of self-buffering cholinium-based Good's buffers ionic liquids (GB-ILs), at 20 and 50% (w/w), as alt...

Encoded by the TP53 gene, the p53 protein is considered the guardian of the genome since it protects DNA against problems occurred during DNA replication by two distinct ways: cell cycle arrest, to correct the error during the replication, and by conducting to apoptosis in cases of irreversible problems [1]. In addition to these benefits, it is als...

Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) is an enzyme involved in catecholamine catabolism that is key for the treatment of different neurologic disorders. Actually, there are still unmet needs concerning the development of more selective membrane-bound COMT (hMBCOMT) downstream strategies, envisaging their application in structural and bio-interaction...

RNA interference-based technologies have emerged as an attractive and effective therapeutic option with potential application in diverse human diseases. These tools rely on the development of efficient strategies to obtain homogeneous non-coding RNA samples with adequate integrity and purity, thus avoiding non-targeted gene-silencing and related si...

The present study reports the successful production of human pre-miR-29b both intra- and extracellularly in the marine phototrophic bacterium Rhodovulum sulfidophilum using recombinant RNA technology. In a first stage, the optimal transformation conditions (0.025 μg of plasmid DNA, with a heat-shock of 2 min at 35 °C) were established, in order to...

BACKGROUND Catechol‐ O ‐methyltransferase ( COMT , EC 2.1.1.6) has been implicated in several human diseases including Parkinson's disease and the most appropriated therapy depends on the efficacy of the COMT inhibitors applied. Therefore, more effective drugs for COMT inhibition are important, and the development of such inhibitors requires resear...

Affinity chromatography strategies using amino acids as immobilize d ligands have been successfully applied for the purification of different biomolecules from complex mixtures. Therefore, in this work, several supports with immobilized amino acids were applied for the purification of membrane-bound catechol-O-methyltransferase (MBCOMT) from Pichia...

Membrane proteins are important drug targets in many human diseases and gathering structural information regarding these proteins encourages the pharmaceutical industry to develop new molecules using structure-based drug design studies. Specifically, membrane-bound catechol-O-methyltransferase (MBCOMT) is an integral membrane protein that catalyzes...

Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT, EC 2.1.1.6) is an enzyme that catalyzes the methylation of catechol substrates, and while structural and functional studies of its membrane-bound isoform (MBCOMT) are still hampered by low recombinant production, Pichia pastoris has been described as an attractive host for the production of correctly folded and i...

Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT, EC 2.1.1.6) plays a crucial role in dopamine metabolism which has intimately linked this enzyme to some neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's disease. In recent years, in the attempt of developing new therapeutic strategies for Parkinson's disease, there has been a growing interest in the search for eff...

The selection of natural and chemical compounds for potential applications in new pharmaceutical formulations constitutes a time-consuming procedure in drug screening. To overcome this issue, new devices called biosensors, have already demonstrated their versatility and capacity for routine clinical diagnosis. Designed to perform analytical analysi...

A rapid and straightforward analytical method, based on the use of RP-HPLC with coulometric detection, was developed and validated for the quantification of metanephrine, anO-methylated product in catechol-O-methyltransferase enzymatic assays. The isocraticseparation was achieved on a reverse column with a mobile phase consisting of 0.1M sodium dih...

The development of new catechol-O-methyltransferase inhibitors has led to an improvement in the treatment of Parkinson's disease. However, despite the fact that the soluble isoform has been extensively investigated, few studies have been published concerning membrane isoform chromatographic recovery and bioactivity levels. In this work, chromatogra...

Despite of membrane catechol-O-methyltransferase (MBCOMT, EC 2.1.1.6) physiological importance on catecholamines' O-methylation, no studies allowed their total isolation. Therefore, for the first time, we compare the performance of three hydrophobic adsorbents (butyl-, epoxy- and octyl-Sepharose) in purification of recombinant human COMT (hMBCOMT)...

During the last few decades, it has become evident that the compatibility of the yeast biochemical environment with the ability to process and translate the RNA transcript, along with its capacity to modify a translated protein, are relevant requirements for selecting this host cell for protein expression in several pharmaceutical and clinical appl...

Membrane proteins constitute 20-30% of all proteins encoded by the genome of various organisms. While large amounts of purified proteins are required for pharmaceutical and crystallization attempts, there is an unmet need for the development of novel heterologous membrane protein overexpression systems. Specifically, we tested the application of Br...

Hydrogels are cross-linked hydrophilic polymer networks that find application in biomedical and pharmaceutical industries due to their unique properties. Polyvinyl alcohol is a synthetic polymer, potential biomaterial blended with various materials and compounds, that can provide new options for drug delivery systems. Determination of photochemical...