Located at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP), RISE-Health is the result of the merger of four research centers. The new health research and development unit will have more than 500 investigators with qualifications in clinical and translational research, digital health and artificial intelligence, biotechnology and biomedical innovation, community health, and nursing research.
RISE-Health is the result of a merger process that brought together FMUP's two research units - CINTESIS (Center for Research in Health Technologies and Services) and UnIC (Cardiovascular Research and Development Unit) - MedInUP - Center for Pharmacological Research and Medicinal Innovation (based at the Abel Salazar Biomedical Sciences Institute - ICBAS) and CICS-UBI - Center for Research in Health Sciences of the Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Beira Interior (UBI).
This merger will encourage "a natural increase in critical mass, as well as providing greater multi and interdisciplinary synergies, resulting in a broad scientific scope and an increase in territorial cohesion between the coast and the interior of the country", reads the statement signed by the coordinators of the research units that make up RISE-Health (Altamiro da Costa Pereira, Adelino Leite Moreira, Patrício Soares da Silva, and Luís Taborda Barata) and by its future coordinator (Fernando Schmitt).
The RISE-Health researchers will have in common the search for "new knowledge and innovative solutions concerning cardiovascular, degenerative and inflammatory diseases, including cancer", which are major causes of mortality and morbidity in Portugal.
RISE-Health will have management centers in four organic units of the U.Porto (ICBAS and Faculty of Pharmacy, Faculty of Dental Medicine and Faculty of Nutrition and Food Sciences), in addition to ten others, namely in five public universities (University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, University of Algarve, University of Aveiro, University of Beira Interior and University of Madeira) and two private higher education institutions (Fernando Pessoa University and Portucalense University).
