Maria Pereira
Maria Pereira is a Portuguese bioengineering scientist, creator of a glue to close open wounds without damaging tissues.
Biography
She was born in 1986 in Leiria. She holds a degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Coimbra, in Portugal, and a PhD in Bioengineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the United States, thanks to the scholarship she was awarded by the MIT-Portugal Program in 2007.She is known for having created a glue to close open wounds without damaging tissue, which is used, for example, for delicate heart operations and to treat babies with congenital heart defect, one in 100, which happens to be the leading cause of infant death in the United States.
Pereira worked on her project to develop a glue that could be used anywhere in the body, including the heart. The glue needed to meet many conditions at once: withstand humidity and dynamic conditions, be elastic to expand and contract with each heartbeat, be hydrophobic, biodegradable and non-toxic. In 2012, she succeeded and met even more criteria: the glue she invented only adheres where it is intended, when the surgeon shines a light on it, thus giving him total control over the process.
She has been an in-house researcher at Gecko Biomedical in biotechnology and medicine in Paris since October 2013.