Alberto Boucas da Silva

“The cloning of Dolly the sheep is what really sparked my interest in science.

At the time, I was like ‘wow’ – we’ll be able to make clones of ourselves soon. The whole human genome sequencing followed soon after that.

It was around the time the boundaries of science were really being pushed. And I thought, ‘that’s really cool, I can do something like that’.

I was restless growing up. I left Portugal at 18 and found myself studying microbiology at the University of South Wales. The Glamorgan valley, it's beautiful, but remote and not much going on. Lots of sheep grazing. And Tom Jones, the singer. That restlessness has kicked in a few times over the years, but my family and I call Switzerland home now.

I come from a family which didn't go to college, so I was one of the first cousins to finish extra study. My teachers at school inspired me to achieve more because they believed in me. They said, ‘look, you're curious enough. But control your curiosity and your mischief,’ and they encouraged me to do that by learning.

My background is in immunology. Very early in my career I was working on Alzheimer's disease vaccines. And I got to know so many patients’ stories that really shaped my thinking and my commitment – but it made me realise the impact we can have.

You need a lot of resilience to work in medical research. There are many things that work in cells in the lab, but fewer than one in 10 projects makes it to a phase one trial, where it’s tested on people.

So, in my role, you're constantly learning how to mitigate those risks. With any project’s failure or success, it's a moment of reflection of what we can learn to increase the chances of success for the next project.

That's exactly the message that I try to pass on to the research teams I work with. Because we can prepare a great plan and everything looks perfect, but there's always going to be setbacks. Surprises will keep on showing up and we'll still have things that we couldn’t anticipate. But it’s just the way that science works. To be successful, there's many things that need to be aligned.

If things didn’t work, it just wasn’t meant to be. Maybe it was not the right target, not the right therapeutic candidate or the right modality for that disease. It can be tough. But it's also very rewarding when you know you and your team have pushed it as far as it could go and you have learnt from the process . Each setback is an opportunity to learn valuable lessons, which ultimately strengthen our approach and increase our chances of success in future projects.
We just need to keep on learning and trying.”