The latest EARA #TransparencyThursday video features Miguel Prudêncio, of the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine (GIMM), Portugal, (an EARA member) who has spoken about his use of animals in research to develop drugs and vaccines for malaria.
In the Q&A, Miguel explains how his lab uses mice to assess the effect of compounds and candidate vaccines that could be used to treat malaria – a disease that kills more than half a million children a year worldwide.
For him it is essential to use animals in his research as ‘we cannot recapitulate the complexity of an organism inside a Petri dish or a cell plate’. This is particularly true for vaccine research, where the response of the immune system across multiple cells and organs needs to be studied.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Miguel was a key scientific spokesperson in the Portuguese media and spoke extensively about the Covid-19 vaccine and vaccination – in the EARA Q&A, he also shared his top tips for communicating research with the public.
Find all episodes of #TransparencyThursday on the EARA YouTube channel.