As we can hear in this last episode of the second season of the ‘Absolutos y Relativos‘ Spanish podcast, nanotechnology has an infinite number of applications. And one of them is nanomedicine: “When you structure matter at the nanometric scale, when you organise the atoms of some materials at this scale, properties different from those of the micrometric scale appear that we can apply in medicine”. This is how Pilar Rivera, coordinator of the Integrative Biomedical Materials and Nanomedicine Lab research group in the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (MELIS-UPF), presents her field of work.
Pilar introduces us to this ‘nanoworld’ stating that “nanoparticles exist in nature and have been used since Roman times”. And in this production of the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB) she will clarify some of the bioethical doubts that their use has raised in recent years. We will also find out about the latest projects her group has been working on: drug encapsulation and product counterfeiting.
In this episode we will also review the trajectory of the researcher, who also emphasises the importance of giving visibility to research: “Until recently, the scientific community has not been concerned with informing people about what we do in an understandable way. We have been preserving science as something only for the few. The pandemic helped us a lot to show what we do and to make people understand that science is useful. If we can make people see our usefulness and perceive our work, research will be more valued and there will be more investment”.
Don’t mis her testimony!