“For me, as a Portuguese citizen, receiving the BIAL Award in Biomedicine has a special meaning.”
Caetano Reis e Sousa obtained a BSc(Hons) in Biology in 1989 from Imperial College, London, and a DPhil in Immunology in 1992 from Oxford. He subsequently trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, USA, with Ron Germain. In 1998, he returned to the UK to set up a research group at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, later to become Cancer Research UK’s London Research Institute. In 2015, the London Research Institute was subsumed into The Francis Crick Institute where Caetano Reis e Sousa is currently an Assistant Research Director and Principal Group Leader, leading the Immunobiology Laboratory. He is also Visiting Professor of Immunology in the Department of Medicine at Imperial College and honorary professor at University College London and King’s College London.
Caetano’s research centres on the mechanisms involved in sensing infection, cancer and tissue injury. He has helped to define the cells and pathways involved in innate immune detection of RNA viruses, fungi and dead cells. His scientific contributions have been widely recognised and he is included in the list of Highly Cited Researchers (Thomson Reuters). He won the BD Biosciences Prize of the European Macrophage and Dendritic Cell Society (2002), the Liliane Bettencourt for Life Sciences Award (2008), the Award for Excellence in Basic/Translational Research from the European Society for Clinical Investigation (2011), the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2017) and the BIAL Award in Biomedicine (2019). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 2019), Fellow of The Academy of Medical Sciences (elected 2006), member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO; elected 2006) and was made an Officer of the Order of Sant’Iago da Espada by the government of Portugal, his home country, in 2009.
