An interdisciplinary team of scientists from different institutions and specializations managed to develop and apply in Argentina a superselective infusion technique of intraocular chemotherapy for treatment of advanced retinoblastoma. The availability of this therapy at the J.P. Garrahan Pediatric Hospital makes it the third institute worldwide in terms of the number of treated patients and a pioneer in the implementation of this technique in Latin America.

Guillermo Mazzolini Rizzo, hepatologist and CONICET independent researcher at the Gene Therapy Laboratory of the School of Biomedical Sciences of the Austral University in Buenos Aires, has been studying for ten years the role of the osteonectin protein, or SPARC, in the hepatic fibrosis, a process that progressively replaces the hepatic tissue with fibrous tissue, caused by different pathologies, and thus it could lead to cirrhosis.

Researchers at the firm 4DNature and the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) are developing a new technology, called helical optical projection tomography, which improves biomedical diagnostic 3D imaging.

The commercial systems that exist today in Spain for the mobility of persons with sight impairment are insufficient, according to theseUC3M researchers, because they are costly and too bulky. The assistive technology, conceived as a sound guide that gives information as to the user’s environment, precisely aims to make this ingenious complement to the classic cane or guide dog more economical. This system’s functioning is spelled out in the doctoral thesis of Pablo Revuelta Sanz, directed by the UC3M professors, Belén Ruíz Mezcua y José Manuel Sánchez Pena, who also belong to the Spanish National Centre for Subtitling and Audio-description (CESyA).

Given that 10.5 % of patients who receive a transplant reject the new organ, researchers at the Center of Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (Cinvestav) are working in the design of a tool capable of preventing this problem. The process consists in knowing the type of proteins in charge of metabolizing the drugs (enzymes) for each patient which would, helped by a mathematical model, allow to establish the exact dose needed of the immunosuppressive drugs required.