Biologist Daniel Martins-de-Souza is on a mission to understand mental illnesses at a molecular level. He has initiated a project to analyze brain tissue and blood samples from patients with schizophrenia. Using mass spectrometry, Daniel can pinpoint specific peptides in a patient’s blood. These biomarkers could enable doctors to predict a drug’s effectiveness for a particular patient more accurately. His research forms the foundation for the development of personalized medicine.
Daniel holds a professorship at the Institute of Biology at UNICAMP, where he also earned his PhD in functional and molecular biology. He has worked in the Department of Psychiatry at Ludwig Maximilians University in Germany and was the head of the CCNR Mass Spectrometry group at Cambridge University in England.
