News U13

An Eskimo in the desert

An Eskimo in the desert is the title of the talk that Ignacio Ochoa Researcher of NANBIOSIS U13 Tissue & Scaffold Characterization Unit is giving today at the Pint of Science Festival in Zaragoza at 19:00.

One of the greatest advances in biomedicine was to achieve, at the end of the 19th century, maintain human cells outside the body in order to study them. This breakthrough has allowed us, for example, to discover new drugs and evaluate the toxicity of many compounds. Unfortunately, this progress has hardly evolved over these 125 years. However, the arrival of microfluidic technology has allowed us to simulate much better what actually happens in our body. This new advance will revolutionize biomedicine, bringing it closer to the goal of personalized medicine

As Iñaki has explained to NANBIOSIS “Cells are accustomed to being in a specific environment in our body (mechanical, chemical, electrical, etc.) and, when we take them out of that environment to study them in the laboratories they stop working in a similar way as they did in vivo. This change of functioning sometimes generates false positives in the study of efficacy of new drugs and generates delays and excessive costs in the development of new treatments. Thanks to the Organ on Chip technology, we can better simulate in the laboratory the environment of the cells under physiopathological conditions (rigidities, gradients, flow or the presence of different cell types) and obtain results closer to the clinic”.

NANBIOSIS researcher Iñaki Ochoa, interviewed in the Heraldo de Aragón criticizes the administrative obstacles to science imposed by law.

Scientists of NANBIOSIS in the University of Zaragoza participated in the assembly held las week that put on the table the risks of applying rules in an incoherent way and without taking into account the reality of the work that researchers develop. The Spanish public contrat law prevents the University to spend more than 15,000 euros per provider per year, which complicates the purchases of material. The scientists ask that this legislation not be applied

More than three hundred researchers  have signed a manifesto in which they denounce that some provisions of the new Spanish law on public contracts prevent them from acquiring normally the material they need for their work. A law that originally aimed to fight corruption is criticizes by scientists becxause of it is causing a serious situation of inoperativeness and inefficiency. The main problem at this time is that the new regulation applies the limit of expenditure per provider of 15,000 euros per year without the need to process a public tender to the University as a whole (as to any public entity), prevoiusly this limit appliied to each research group but the  amount  is obviously insignificant for all the research groups of a University.

The professor of the Faculty of Medicine, Iñaki Ochoa,Researcher at NANBIOSIS Unit 13 advocates changing the rule that limits public contracts by not considering it “something reasonable”. As part of the Applied Mechanics and Bioengineering group of the Aragón Engineering Research Institute (I3A), he defended the need to protest to change things: “If I need a reagent to take samples in a patient that is going to be operated in a few weeks, I can wait two months until your purchase is authorized », alert. In your specific case, when working in the analysis of brain tumors, the opportunities to access surgeries are limited.

Ochoa assumes that research has always been “complicated,” both because of lack of funding and lack of resources. But in this case he believes that the new obstacles are completely excessive

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Manuel Doblaré, Unit 13 of NANBIOSIS, SEMNI Award O. C. Zienkiewicz

The Spanish Society of Numerical Methods in Engineering (SEMNI) has awarded the SEMNI O. C. Zienkiewicz prize to Professor Dr. Manuel Doblaré.

The SEMNI O. C. Zienkiewicz Award is the highest award given by this company and recognizes, in this case, both the undisputed scientific curriculum of prof. Doblaré as his permanent contribution to the good functioning of this society, of which he has been a founding member and member of its executive committee until 2007, having also organized the Congress of Numerical Methods in Zaragoza in 1996.

The prize will be given during the Congress of Numerical Methods to be held in Guimarães from July 1 to 3, 2019. The Congress on Numerical Methods in Engineering takes place biennially and is jointly organized by the Spanish Society on Numerical Methods in Engineering (SEMNI, Spain) and the “Portuguese Association of Theoretical, Applied and Computational Mechanics” (APMTAC, Portugal)