Resumo

Food waste is a major concern of industries, authorities, and civil society due to environmental and economic problems. Approximately 88 million tonnes of food waste are annually generated in the European Union (EU) with associated costs estimated at 143 billion euros. However, some of these by-products are extremely rich in bioactive compounds with biological properties, such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory or even antimicrobial activity, that can be valorised for pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. Nevertheless, the extraction technique used and the safeness of the final extracts should be ensured by in-vitro and in-vivo assays. This presentation will explore the potentialities of food by-products as new active ingredients and demonstrate their validation and applicability in pharmaceutical and cosmetic fields.

CV - Francisca Rodrigues

Francisca Rodrigues is investigator at REQUIMTE/LAQV, being allocated at Grupo de Reação e Análises Químicas (GRAQ) – Superior Institute of Engineering of Porto (ISEP). She graduated in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Porto (UP) in 2008 and completed a MSc in Quality Control at the same institution in 2011. Afterwards, she finished her PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 2016 at UP. Between July 2016 and August 2018, she became a postdoc at Food Science group located at LAQV/REQUIMTE and in September 2018 she was appointed as Researcher at GRAQ, where she starts a new line of research. So far, she has supervised/co-supervised 1 Post-Doc, 6 PhD students and 20 MSc students. She published more than 65 papers in international peer reviewed journals and 19 book chapters. She attracted direct competitive funding, being the principal investigator (PI) and Co-PI of 5 projects founded by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), being also enrolled in Co-development TR&D projects with cosmetic and food companies. Her current research is focused on understanding the compounds present in food by-products, using eco-friendly extraction techniques, in order to employ them as safe ingredients in pharmaceutical,cosmetic and food fields. In particular, she intends to validate extracts obtained from food by-products for aging and chronic diseases. She has also a deep interest on the in vitro assessment of these ingredients using validated models as well as for the in vitro/in vivo correlation.

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