If you travel to Agassaim and surrounding areas such as Siridao, you are bound to hear Goans speak proudly about their families based in France. A few years ago, a riveting story about a boy in his early twenties, speaking about the Konkani language at a conference in France made waves in Goa. His family and friends back in Goa were beaming with pride when this young lad gave a speech at Goa University, about his efforts to promote Goa’s language and culture.
This was in 2015. Fast forward to 2019 and now they are now elated yet again about Carino Dias Gurjao, the son of Gaspar Gurjao from Agassaim and Piedade Dias from Ambelim. His parents are Goans who had migrated to Paris and most of their relatives and friends are based in Goa. Piedade’s parents Casmiro and Pedrina Dias are still living in Ambelim while the parents of Gaspar, Albino and Ana Maria Gurjao are deceased.
Carino is currently in cancer research at Harvard Medical School/ MIT in Boston. He recently had one of his articles published in a prestigious oncology journal. It’s considered to be an important discovery, which may offer clues to new immunotherapy strategies for cancer.
According to the American Cancer Society, ‘Immunotherapy’ is treatment that uses your body’s own immune system to help fight cancer.
“My latest work has been published in Cancer Immunology Research, a top 10 immunology journal. I am the lead author of this work and corresponding article. In the laboratory of Dr Marios Giannakis and with the help of collaborating physicians, pathologists and other scientists from Harvard and MIT, we examined a patient with colorectal cancer that did not respond to immunotherapy (a novel type of cancer treatment) despite molecular features that would have predicted a response. We found mutations and immune components that we believe explain this resistance,” said Carino.
Incidentally, Carino has spent years in this field. Earlier, he was working for Institut Curie, one of the leading medical, biological and biophysical research centres in the world, where his main research interests were cancer and tumour growth. He studied bioinformatics engineering at one of the best universities of Science and Technology in Europe. According to wikipedia, ‘Bioinformatics’ is an interdisciplinary field of science, which combines biology, computer science, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyse and interpret biological data. He has a Master of Science in Engineering from the acclaimed French Engineering School -INSA Lyon. After graduating, he was hired by Harvard Medical School and MIT Boston to work in cancer research in the Giannakis lab and at present is the primary computational analyst of the some of the largest and most-comprehensive cancer cohorts.
“My goals are to discover lifestyle and diet habits that associate with different types and aggressiveness in colorectal cancer as well as gain insights into novel therapies for this disease,” added Carino.
