Mariana Brandão obtained her Master’s Degree in Medicine, from the University of Porto, Portugal in 2010 and underwent a residency program on Medical Oncology at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology of Porto from 2012-2017. As part of her training, she also completed a short clinical fellowship at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, UK in 2017.

Dr Brandão moved to Institut Jules Bordet, in Brussels, Belgium, to start a clinical research fellowship in 2017. During her fellowship, she worked on the writing and reviewing of clinical trials synopsis and/or protocols, protocol amendments and any other study related documents. She worked in the development of clinical research projects, generating original data and wrote systematic reviews and classic reviews, among other projects. She also started a translational project regarding the impact of HIV infection in patients with breast cancer, involving centers from Belgium, Botswana, Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal.

She completed her PhD on Public Health at the University of Porto in 2021. Within the aim of her PhD project, she visited Mozambique several times to work on the development of the Maputo Central Hospital’s Cancer Registry, along with the assembly and study of a prospective cohort of women with breast cancer. She has also collaborated in the study of a cohort of breast cancer patients at the Portuguese Institute of Oncology of Porto, studying the relationship between the biological and socio-economic heterogeneity among breast cancer patients and its implications on health care expenditure. This work has led to the publication of multiple manuscripts and oral presentations at international congresses.

Since January 2021, she has been working as a Consultant Medical Oncologist at the Department of Medical Oncology – Clinic of Thoracic Oncology and at the Phase I Clinical Trials Unit of Institut Jules Bordet. She is also a Faculty member of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
She is developing a clinical trial regarding the application of liquid biopsy for patients with advanced non-small lung cancer in Belgium and is also working with Prof. Etienne Meylan’s lab on translational research projects on the role of neutrophils in the development of NSCLC. In addition, she actively participates as Principal Investigator or sub-PI in multiple phase 1 to phase 3 clinical trials at Institut Jules Bordet.

Since 2022, she has been the Chair of the Young and Early Career Investigators subgroup within the EORTC Lung Cancer Group. She is a member of the ESMO Metastatic NSCLC Faculty Group, the ESMO Leadership Development Committee and ESMO Cancer Medicines Committee.