Biography

João Conde is a Group Leader, Professor and Vice-Dean for Research at NOVA Medical School, NOVA Medical Research, Comprehensive Health Research Centre (CHRC), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. In 2014, he received his PhD in Biology with a specialization in NanoBiotechnology from the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and the Universidad de Zaragoza as part of the FP7 European Consortium NanoScieE+-NanoTruck for the development of multifunctional gold nanoparticles for gene silencing. Following that, he was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Harvard-MIT Division for Health Sciences and Technology, and Queen Mary University of London's School of Engineering and Materials Science. From 2017 to 2019, he was a Junior Investigator at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular. In 2019, he won an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council (1.5M€) to build a genetic biobarcode to profile breast cancer heterogeneity. He is also a co-founder of the biotech company TargTex, Targeted Therapeutics for Glioblastoma Multiforme (Funding ~20M€, European Innovation Council Accelerator - 14M€). Since 2020, he is also a Senior Collaborator of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Consortium from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington. In 2023, he partnered with Vector Bioscience Cambridge and AstraZeneca to develop RNA-based cancer therapies from the European Innovation Council Transition (2.5M€). In 2023, was elected for the Scientific Advisory Board of FCT: Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. Since 2024, he has been on the Scientific Advisory board of Vector Bioscience Cambridge. In 2025, NOVA Medical School was awarded ~6.5M€ (FEDER and Haddad Foundation) to build a preclinical-to-clinical hub and a medical innovation center with João Conde as coordinator.

The main aspects related to the recognition and diffusion of his early contributions are: more than 140 articles in journals of Cancer Therapy, Oncology, Nanotechnology/Materials Science and NanoMedicine (The Lancet, Nature Materials, The Lancet Oncology, Nature Nanotechnology, JAMA Oncology, Nature Communications, The Lancet Gastroenterol Hepatol, Nature Rev Methods Primers, PNAS, The Lancet Neurology, Nature Rev Bioengineering, The Lancet Public Health, Accounts of Chemical Research, The Lancet Child Adolesc Health, Progress in Materials Science, ACS Nano, Advanced Materials, JACS, Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Functional Materials, Advanced Science, Trends in Cancer, Trends in Biotechnology, Biomaterials, etc), more than 30 articles are as 1st author and more than 65 articles as corresponding author and cited more than 17.000 times (h-index 57). More than 35 of them have been selected as cover pages for journals such as Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology (COVID-19 Special Issue), The Lancet, The Lancet Oncology, Nature Reviews Materials, The Lancet Public Health, ACS Nano, JAMA Oncology, JACC, Matter, Nano Letters, Adv. Functional Materials, Matter, Trends in Cancer, JACS, Angewandte Chemie, ACS Central Science, ACS Sensors, Biomaterials Science, ACS Applied Bio Mat, Adv. Healthcare Materials, Analytical & Bioanalytical Chemistry, and BioTechniques. In addition, 12 international patents on nanomaterials-based platforms for cancer therapy and diagnosis were submitted and/or approved. He was also awarded several international awards, including the 2023 and 2022 World’s Top 2% Scientists list by Stanford University, the Nanomaterials 2020 Young Investigator Award, the 2021 Biomaterials Science Emerging Investigator, the Top 2% Most cited in Nanoscience/ Nanotechnology from PLOS Biology, the Wellcome Image Awards 2017, the Nano-Micro Letters Researcher Award, and the National Cancer Institute Image Award.