2023-05-18 16:07:00
This Thursday the Center for Research in Translational Medicine and Molecular Epidemiology –Intemlab– of the Universidad del Norte was inaugurated.
The rector of this alma mater, Adolfo Meisel, highlighted the importance of this type of laboratory to consolidate all this institutional commitment in the area of health, strengthening the research capacity of the doctors, professionals and students of this university campus.
“The health area of the Universidad del Norte is well positioned at the national level, our dentistry, nursing and medicine programs are the first in the Colombian Caribbean and occupy the first places in Colombia. With this commitment, we want to strengthen research, because the area of medicine is constantly evolving and if doctors do not investigate and renew themselves throughout their professional lives, their knowledge becomes obsolete,” said the manager.
The construction of this Research Center, in which around $5 billion was invested, relied on resources from the General System of Royalties and those of the Universidad del Norte, as well as the support of the Santo Domingo Foundation.
According to Hernando Baquero, dean of the Health Sciences Division of the Universidad del Norte, the aim of the translational medicine area is to ensure that basic research can quickly provide services to patients in the clinical area, that is, to shorten the times from the beginning of the research until it finally becomes better treatments, better quality of life and interventions for the population.
In the same way, he pointed out that with the area of molecular epidemiology it is intended to monitor how infections move from the genetic, molecular, atomic, protein and marker point of view. An example of these two great pillars – according to Baquero – had to do with the pandemic.
“Translational medicine was in charge of ensuring that the vaccines that were in an experimental phase quickly came to be applied in the world and in molecular epidemiology with the tests to diagnose the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the different variants that had been circulating,” he explained.
The dean specified that from this Thursday the laboratories come into operation to provide their services to researchers and the community in general.
“We are going to help the Colombian Caribbean to identify outbreaks of infections, we are going to work with the ports, in epidemiological surveillance with the National Institute of Health (INS), we are going to validate tests developed in other laboratories in the world and accompany all this development process of the Hospital de la Universidad del Norte”, he noted.
Meanwhile, Mónica Mercado, a researcher and clinical epidemiologist, stated that what was experienced in the covid-19 pandemic demonstrated great shortcomings in the response to health emergencies in the country, including having well-equipped laboratories and trained technical personnel. that can deal with these cases.
For this reason, he highlighted the importance of the inauguration of the Uninorte research center because, according to what he said, it will allow the generation of high-tech and high-level diagnostic capacities in the Caribbean region.
“It allows us to expand and dimension the subject of specialized diagnosis a little more. Universities must have research capacity and more now in basic and applied sciences, this is a center that will have as its main objective to carry out state-of-the-art research with new generation technology and high-containment laboratories that are capable of housing microorganisms with a pandemic nature that they can be guarded,” he said.
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