Natália Marto, a physician specializing in Internal Medicine and Clinical Pharmacology, is the most recent PhD in Grupo Luz Saúde. This week, the doctor from Hospital da Luz Lisboa defended, at the Nova Medica School of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, her doctoral thesis entitled 'In Vivo Phenotyping of Sult1a enzymes in man: implications for precision medicine', which was unanimously approved. with praise and distinction. Dedicated for years to clinical pharmacology and with several works already published in this area, Natália Marto presented, in her doctoral thesis, the new tool for measuring and comparing the sulfonation capacity of the human body (a metabolic process common to neurotransmitters, hormones, , carcinogens and other environmental compounds), in addition to an assessment of the intra- and inter-individual variability of sulfonation capacity in a group of healthy individuals and another group of hypertensive patients, as well as the identification of a sulfonation biomarker «using untargeted metabolomics». In short, it is about creating and proving the feasibility of a method that allows the study of individual variability in the response to drugs and, therefore, essential in precision medicine. Natália Marto led the first clinical trial in Portugal that had a private hospital (Hospital da Luz) as a promoter, and whose object already involved the assessment of the feasibility of this new tool. In May of last year, the results of this trial were published in the journal Scientific Reports, by Nature and presented, at the same time, at the congress 'Experimental Biology', of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. Natália Marto doctoral thesis – which was supervised by Emília Monteiro, Sofia Azeredo Pereira and Judit Morello – was evaluated by a jury chaired by Pedro Rodrigues Póvoa, professor at Nova Medical School at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. As members, members of this jury were Adrián Llerena Ruiz, full professor at the Facultad de Medicina y Ciencias de la Salud at the Universidad de Extremadura (Spain); Félix Dias Carvalho, full professor at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Porto; Maria Emília Carreira Saraiva Monteiro, full professor at NOVA Medical School at Universidade Nova de Lisboa; Natália Sofia Cláudio António, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra; and Pedro Miguel Guimarães Marques Cunha, visiting assistant professor at the University of Minho School of Medicine. Natália Marto thus adds to her curriculum, from now on, the Doctorate in Medicine, a specialty in Clinical Research, an academic achievement that Grupo Luz Saúde celebrates and honors. Congratulations, Dr. Natalia Marto!
