The workshop “Beating the Blood-Brain and Other Blood Barriers” took place on 6-8 February 2013 at the Egas Moniz building, as part of the project funded by the European Commission “Selected peptides as drug candidates directed to pain and neurodegeneration”coordinated by Professor Miguel Castanho (Biochemistry Institute) under the Institute of Molecular Medicine.
The meeting brought together guest speakers from Germany, Australia, the United States, Hungary, Japan, the UK, and Switzerland, and was divided into four themes:

1) “Structure and function of the blood-brain barrier”
2) “The blood-retinal barrier”
3) “The blood-cerebrospinal barrier”
4) “Beating the blood-brain barrier in drug development”

Professor Isaura Tavares (FMUP), a pain specialist, presented the results of the project that gave rise to the workshop. A consortium of researchers from FMUL, FMUP, University of Girona (Spain), University of Tübingen (Germany), and from R&D companies Bialvo (Portugal) and Synovo (Germany) discovered that the amidation of the dipeptide tyrosyl–arginine (kyotorphin) and its chemical bonding to Ibuprofen make it a powerful analgesic following systemic administration in animal models. Research on these molecules will continue at FMUL/IMM and FMUP.

  
Symbolically, the meeting was held at the Professor David Ferreira Amphitheatre, a scholar who studied the proteins that confer some tissues barrier properties. Referring to the tribute that the walls of this amphitheatre pay to Professor David Ferreira, Dr Hartwig Wolbrug wrote to his colleagues, via email, the following message after the workshop:

“Dear Collegues,
I very much enjoyed the meeting in Lisboa. But again at home, I detected a wonderful historical detail. We all looked in the lecture hall at the wall, where at the right hand side the celebration of the first electron microscope in Lisboa was pictured. The head of the electron microscopical department was Jose Francisco David-Ferreira.
Looking in PubMed I bacame aware of the still best freeze-fracture investigation of the Sertoli Cell Tight Junctions at the blood-testis barrier, and who was the author? Jose Francisco David-Ferreira […].
As I spoke about parallel-stranded, claudin-11 positive tight junctions, 10 meters apart of me one of the most prominent detectors of these tight junctions was pictured at the wall, and I was not aware of this, but nevertheless belated.
But now I feel grateful to have learnt this, and I hope, this may be also interesting for you.”
A lesson to be remembered.

Additional information here.