His name is Acácio Gonçalves Rodrigues. He is the coordinator of the research group MicroMed, at CINTESIS, he is an Associate Professor, with Aggregation, at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto (FMUP), where he is in charge of the Microbiology Laboratory, and he is a medical specialist at the University Hospital Center of São João, where he coordinates the Burn Unit of the Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgery Service since 2006.
He was born and raised in Porto. His family is mostly from the Douro and Trás-os-Montes, two places where he spent many holidays and to which he maintains deep connections. “I’m a country-born man who loves the countryside. I really enjoy the outdoors”, he says.
In 1982, at the age of 18, he was accepted at FMUP from where he graduated as a medical doctor in 1988. “My choice for medicine had to do with research. I didn’t have the standard of taking care of others, although I come from a family of doctors. I spoke to some people, who told me that if I wanted to do research, especially in the field of Microbiology, I would have to go to the Faculty of Medicine”, he recalls.
Interestingly, this decision was based on a book he read early on: “I started reading very early (at the age of five I already read perfectly) and the first book I read in my childhood was an illustrated biography about the life of Louis Pasteur. This book told two stories that impressed me: one was about carbuncle (anthrax), the malignant pustule, which caused a wound, especially in the face, treated with red-hot iron; another was the story of a French boy who was bitten by a rabid dog and to whom Pasteur administered increasing amounts of extract/macerate of the dog’s nervous system and immunized him”.
Acácio Rodrigues was touched mainly by the first story because, “in Alfândega da Fé, in my paternal grandmother’s house, there was a maid, an admirable and very beautiful lady, but who had a scar on one side of her face. That summer, I asked her the reason for that scar and she replied that when she was young, she had had a wound and a farrier burned it with red-hot iron to save her. I associated her story with Pasteur’s book. That affected me; in fact, it had been carbuncle”.
He managed to realize his ambition to investigate and he began doing research when he was in his second year of medicine. But something changed. “The truth is that, during the course, I started to enjoy seeing patients,” he recalls. He went to the Infectious Diseases Service, at a time when the HIV-AIDS boom was taking place, but that was not what attracted him. He wanted to treat critically ill patients with sepsis and multiorgan failure. For this reason, he specialized in Anesthesia and Intensive Care at the Hospital of São João in 1995 and completed a subspecialization in Emergency Medicine in 2002.
Sweden is also a mandatory stopover point in his biography during his medical internship. The first time he visited that country was in 1990. He returned in the following years, taking advantage of the holidays to deepen his investigation at the Institute of Clinical Bacteriology of the University of Uppsala, which had resources that were not available in Portugal. He even enrolled as a doctoral student at the Swedish university and admits that he was seriously tempted to pursue his career abroad. From that time in Sweden, there are also family memories, with his wife, Cidália Pina Vaz, who he met when they were students and who accompanying him. “I have pictures of my oldest daughter, then four months old, in the laboratory with us”, he recalls.
“I am a Cintesis native”
Meanwhile, Acácio Rodrigues received his Ph.D. from FMUP and, since 2000, he chose to dedicate himself mainly to teaching (he has been teaching since the sixth year of his medical studies) and to research, but maintaining clinical activity at the UHCSJ. CINTESIS came into his life at the invitation of Altamiro da Costa Pereira. “When I joined CINTESIS, I belonged to another research unit. Today, I am a Cintesis native. CINTESIS is an institution that has given more than proof of what it is capable of doing. It is curious the evolution that these units are going through, in which the possibility of re-merging is now outlined. “As Lavoisier said, nothing is created, everything is transformed; or, as our Camões used to say, life is about change”, he quotes.
In the research group he leads, times are challenging. “We continue to work, with all the difficulties inherent in the COVID-19 pandemic, which forces people to be as far away as possible. Microbiology research is not done in telework. It is written away from the laboratory, but for that, it is necessary to have data, and these come from laboratory work, which has been seriously impaired. Still, we managed to publish 11 articles during the year, which was a good thing [he has more than a hundred and a half scientific articles published in indexed international journals]. If this pandemic continues, our investigation will be greatly affected. And I predict that it can go on for a considerable time. Do not expect miracles”.
MicroMed has been dedicated to research in Medical Microbiology, namely to emerging microorganisms and to the development of new means or diagnostic tools, based on new disruptive technologies, together with FASTinov, a spin-off of the University of Porto and of CINTESIS that he co-founded and that it is financed by Horizon 2020. Some of the main work has been done in areas such as resistance to antimicrobials. In addition to respiratory pathogens such as Legionella pneumophila, which are a very current topic, the team also addresses other dangerous enemies of public health, such as Acinetobacter baumannii and Candida auris.
“Invasive fungal infections cannot be left behind either. The greatest impact of this new coronavirus is also, not by chance, in more fragile people, with associated diseases and with immunological deficits caused by different reasons, such as medical procedures, pathologies, treatments”, he notes. And in the course of internment for COVID-19, these emerging agents are again taking an important number of lives.
Control of infection in a hospital setting is another priority. “Everything contributes, at this moment, to a perfect storm in terms of infections associated with healthcare”, he warns. Sustainability and food security are also areas of ongoing research. “There are a number of drugs, such as antifungals, that are used in agriculture, but that arouse cross-resistance to the antifungals used to treat humans. It’s all connected, that’s what the concept of single health tells us”, he says.
As for the more immediate future, Acácio Rodrigues wants to “strengthen the team and to strengthen CINTESIS”. In addition, he would like to see the proposal for a new Associate Laboratory, RISE – Health Research Network From The Lab to The Community, of which he is a part, to become a reality. In the long run, he prefers not to make plans: “The pandemic put the notion of the unpredictable, the imponderable, the unavoidable in the spotlight”.
May he never lack time to do other things he likes besides work, such as walking in the countryside, reading, and writing. And who knows, one day, his writings, other than those of the doctor, professor, and researcher, will see the light of day.