Academic History

Mariana Brandão, MD, PhD is a Consultant Medical Oncologist at the Institut Jules Bordet, Brussels, Belgium, and an Associate Professor at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. She achieved her medical degree at the University of Porto, Porto, Portugal in 2010 and completed her residency program in Medical Oncology at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology, Porto, Portugal, in 2017, which also involved a short clinical fellowship at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK. She then completed a clinical research fellowship in 2020 at the Institut Jules Bordet, and went on to achieve a PhD in Public Health in 2021 at the University of Porto.

Dr Brandão specializes in the design and development of clinical trials from Phase I to registrational Phase III, amongst other research projects. She is a member of the Belgian Society of Medical Oncology (BSMO), American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), Metastatic Faculty Group, International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), African Organization for Research & Training in Africa (AORTIC), Portuguese Society of Oncology, and the Portuguese Medical Association.

Speaking on the clinical trial design and development

During her PhD, Dr Brandão worked on the development of the Maputo Central Hospital’s Cancer Registry in Mozambique and studied the link between biological and socio-economic heterogeneity among a prospective cohort of patients with breast cancer. Dr Brandão is currently developing a clinical trial investigating the application of liquid biopsy for patients with advanced non-small lung cancer. She is also working on a translational project to investigate the impact of HIV infection on patients with breast cancer. She is the Chair of the Young and Early Career Investigators subgroup and an active member in the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) Lung Cancer Group.