Welcome to the Official page of the Presidency of the Portuguese Republic

I am very pleased, once again, to attend the award ceremony of the BIAL Prizes.

This year, the ceremony is held in Coimbra University, an institution that celebrates its 725 years of existence and which stands out, in the different branches of knowledge but very specially in Medicine, by the quality of its teaching, by the values it instils in its students and by the excellent results of its researchers.

I want to very warmly congratulate all the many national and international applicants, which naturally obliged the jury to toilsome work. I greet them all and especially their president, Professor Doctor Catarina Resende de Oliveira.

The 2014 BIAL Grand Prize for Medicine distinguishes the study, throughout 20 years, of the team led by Professor Miguel Seabra, of the comprehension of a rare genetic disease that affects the retina and leads to blindness.

Considering the already achieved positive results, it is expected that in the very near future genetic therapy will become a generalized treatment, and that this disease will be one of the first to be treated with healing purposes and not just symptomatically.

The BIAL Prize for Clinical Medicine was attributed to research work carried out by a team led by Professor Jorge Polónia, which shows far fetching results for an intervention strategy in public health, scientifically proving the relevance of information and preventive practices in sickness and of citizens’ own responsibility for their state of health.

This year’s Honourable Mentions reward two experimental and clinical works, coordinated by Professors Tiago Bilhim and José Castillo, which open possibilities to new and promissory therapeutic approaches in two pathologies which are expected to be increasingly prevalent, since they deal with sickness linked to aging.

I congratulate the rewarded researchers and the institutions they represent, but I also want to leave a message of recognition to all the patients that voluntarily collaborated with the research teams. Without voluntary cooperation such encouraging results would only have been reached with great difficulty.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have stated, on several occasions – including here, in Coimbra University – that Portugal has available excellent research units and scientists of the highest quality and international prestige.

In the field of Medical Sciences, the number of doctorate degrees and particularly the volume of scientific production have recorded significant progress, from which emerges what I have already classified as a “new wave” of knowledge of sciences of life and biotechnology, with applications in better health care.

In this ceremony, which is the last I shall attend in the exercise of my duties, I would like to show my enormous regard for the Bial Foundation and for its president, Dr. Luis Portela, for the extraordinary incentive that, throughout the years, they have provided for the scientific study of the human being.

This action has not just been developed with the Bial Prize, set up in 1984, but also through competitions for the attribution of scientific research scholarships and symposiums in the field of Neurosciences. To be stressed also is the dissemination of all this agglomeration of knowledge through the data base of the recently created Documentation Centre.

We are, in effect, viewing an instance, as notable as it is consistent, of the culture of innovation that characterizes Bial. An example which is owed to a pioneering vision of a university-company partnership and a significant investment in R&D, materialized, from its very beginning, by the setting up of a multinational team of excellence in terms of research.

To provide visibility to this good examples, encouraging their being repeated in other locations, is also a contribution towards the materialization of our potential in the fields of science and of knowledge. Therein resides the future. The way how we develop science and knowledge will prescribe what we will be in the near future, as a people and as a destination community.

On behalf of Portugal and of the Portuguese, I address Dr. Luis Portela a heartfelt word of recognition.

Thank you for your attentiveness.