Medical Breakthrough

This note was published by EITb:

Trichonomas vaginalis

Basque scientist contributes to a breakthrough in medicine

Felix Bastida, together with other scientists, made a great step forward in research on a sexually transmitted human pathogen. The breakthrough was echoed by important scientific publications.

The prestigious science magazine Science published a paper that describes the genome sequence of the protist Trichomonas vaginalis, a sexually transmitted human pathogen. One of the researches was the Basque Felix Bastida, actually leading Vacunek, a company of technology transference created by Neiker-Tecnalia.

The research of Felix Bastida and a group of scientists of the University of California had been recognised by its publication by Science, one of the most prestigious magazines.

After a journey at several U.S. universities, the young Basque scientist is actually living in the Basque Country and collaborating with the Department of Production and Animal Health of Neiker-Tecnalia, an ambitious project to find vaccines and products to diagnose animal diseases.

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Tears

This health related article comes to us via EITb:

Two Basque firms research into tears' help to diagnose eye illness

The method is similar to pregnancy tests, and the easy use of the system, its immediacy and simplicity will make the daily use of the test possible.

The Technological Centre Gaiker-IK4 and the Clinical Surgical Institute of Ophthalmology of Bilbao (ICQO) have developed a method to diagnose eye illnesses through tears. The system will be working late next year.

The method, similar to pregnancy tests, will initially detect specific characteristics of eye pathologies like conjuntivochalasis.

As the managers of the project explained, its easy use, immediacy and simplicity will make the daily use of the test at the clinic possible.

For late 2008, the firms expect to develop a multiple system that would detect other eye pathologies and to bring it out to market.

The research project started in 2004 and will expectedly finish next year. Its foundations are a report on proteins comparing tear samples of patients affected by conjuntivochalasis and queratocone, and healthy patients.

An only sample allows the analysis of all proteins in a tear that are involved in the progress of a certain eye pathology, identifying different characteristics that could be used to develop multiple diagnosing systems.

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