This year he celebrates 20 years as a journalist specializing in health. An anniversary that has made me ask myself many questions about my profession and about the advances I have experienced -and that I have been able to tell- in these two decades.
One of the aspects that has most caught my attention is that several of the first memories of my life are related to science: my mother is a researcher and she took me to the University City of Madrid, to the animal facility of what was then called Junta of Nuclear Energy and today is the Ciemat, the Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research.
Later, my mother helped in the research and development of monoclonal antibodies and gene therapy. It took many years for these treatments to become realities that reach the clinic and allow patients to be treated. For me, it has been fascinating to see how topics we talked about at home were finally presented at international conferences. And I was there to see it and to inform the readers, whether they were the general public, doctors or pharmacists.
One of the main current trends in biomedicine is the so-called predictive medicine, which allows the identification of healthy people with a predisposition to develop certain diseases. Advances in the handling of millions of pieces of data (the famous Big Data) are allowing for better genetic analysis, which makes it possible to analyze risk factors and, with the collaboration of a multidisciplinary team of health professionals, to implement prevention programs.
It is being a fascinating present in this field. And a promising future lies ahead. I hope to be able to continue writing on this topic for years to come. And, when he looks back 20 years from now, he will feel the same astonishment that that boy had in 1976 looking at the animals in the animal facility at the University City of Madrid and who never imagined that this research in the pre-clinical phase would end up benefiting millions of people. patients all over the world.
Javier Granda Revilla
Freelance journalist specializing in health
Member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Health Informants
Professor of Scientific Communication in the ESAME Master at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Barcelona
Javier Granda Revilla
Expriences in media dedicated to medicine and the humanities (film, music, literature, art, history). Collaborator in the 120 Minutes program on TeleMadrid. Collaborator as a professor of health communication in the Master of the scientific departments of the pharmaceutical industry of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Barcelona between 2009 and 2021. Since 2013 board member of the National Association of Health Informants (ANIS) and member of the Spanish Association of Scientific Communication (AEC2) and the Association of Biotechnology Communicators (ACB)