More than thirty students approach new trends in biomedicine at CiMUS
- USC Summer Course concludes with great success of attendees and speakers
For five days at the USC's CiMUS, more than thirty participants were able to learn about the latest findings in biomedicine from leading figures in this field, including a dozen researchers from this Singular Centre, who shared the programme with specialists from other centres such as CIQUS, INCIFOR, CBMSO, IBEC, CNIC or CSIC, to address the most recent advances in the understanding of the biological bases of diseases of global importance such as cancer or obesity, advances in molecular medicine and genomics, cellular and molecular mechanisms of ageing, animal models, stem cells or gene editing and its applications.
"Biomedical research is a field that is constantly advancing and requires constant updating," say the organisers of the New Trends in Biomedicine course, Anxo Vidal and Manuel Collado, both CiMUS researchers, who are responsible for coordinating this summer course, which has reached its end with great success among attendees and speakers. They talk about it in more depth in the following interviews.
Interview with Anxo Vidal
What have been the main novelties of this edition?
This course is held every two years and is now in its third edition. In each one of them we try to introduce the most topical subjects that year, given by speakers both from CiMUS and from other leading national research centres.
Why these topics and not others?
In each edition, we try to design a balanced programme that includes both basic and applied research topics, as well as different types of diseases such as metabolic, genetic, neurological...; incorporating those that are having a greater impact on society.
How did the opportunity to organise this Summer Course arise?
It arose from a collaboration with Manuel Collado, at that time an IDIS researcher, who today also forms part of the CiMUS as principal investigator, with which we sought to cover the most recent developments in biomedicine for all possible levels of training. We detected that this course was of great interest to the scientific community and also to students in their final year of science degrees.
What is your assessment of this edition?
We are very satisfied, both with the level of the presentations, for which we are grateful to all the speakers who agreed to participate in this course, and with the level of participation, with thirty-five participants from very different backgrounds and levels. We were accompanied by professionals who have already finished their degree, but also by young high school students who have not yet begun their studies. It is very gratifying to see the interest and the good reception of each edition.
Interview with Manuel Collado
What is the profile of the participants in this course?
The profiles are quite heterogeneous. Many of them are students in their final years of undergraduate studies or who are already studying for a Master's degree, who are very close to the field of biomedicine (biology, biotechnology, pharmacy students, etc.), but there are also students who are not so close to this reality, such as physics students.
Why the title "New Trends in Biomedicine"?
With this title we try to reflect the fact that biomedicine is a field in continuous expansion and renewal. With this course we seek to bring students closer to current topics that they are not seeing in their university training plans, with the help of leading figures in each of the fields of biomedicine, in the field of research.
What's new for the fourth edition?
Each edition we seek to bring leading professionals both nationally and internationally to provide a new and close vision, which helps to complement the knowledge acquired at the University. Specialists who speak from the reality of research, telling us about their most recent findings, even unpublished ones, how they arrived at them, the problems they have encountered. And this is what we will also do in the fourth edition.