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The Aragón Health Research Institute (IIS Aragón) was created just five years ago and has already managed to become a reference for the community in the biomedical field. In 1990, professionals who researched health did so at universities or in hospitals with few means and funding.
Doing health research in the early 90s in Spain, and therefore in Aragon, was frowned upon. There was no research culture like there is today and the quality of the projects and the research itself was very low. From the second regional position in research, Aragón has risen to first, and has achieved this thanks to the creation of the Aragón Health Research Institute (ISS). The community still has room to play in the research Champions; and plenty of talent and desire.
30 years ago, biomedical research was carried out in isolation and through differentiated focuses in hospitals and medical or veterinary schools. Ángel Lanas, scientific director of the IIS and head of the digestive service at the Zaragoza Clinical Hospital, was already investigating in those years. «I was in the United States and returned in 1991, before we were doing very local things, what the hospital could offer you, it was all very rudimentary. But upon my return we began to do the first research and basic projects. There were many difficulties and little money,” explains Lanas, the Aragonese most cited in scientific publications around the planet.
Lanas knows how this experimentation has evolved, originally the result of the individual efforts of a few researchers who carry out research more frequently in universities than in hospitals. "It seemed like you were doing something wrong when you went to the laboratory, there was no such culture, but everything changed progressively because at the university it was considered that research is something innate to this activity," recalls researcher Lanas.
In 1986, the Science Law was approved in Spain, replaced in 2011 by the current Science, Technology and Innovation Law. That norm came to put order precisely to that spontaneous and dispersed model of the national system of
investigation, but it took time. In 2002, with Alberto Larraz as Minister of Health of the Government of Aragon, the Aragonese Institute of Health Sciences (IACS) was created, an organization dependent on the DGA that tried to organize everything that existed in terms of research and that served as a coordinating and support entity. Other autonomous communities had already done so before, such as neighboring Catalonia, where the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) had been established in 2001. Earlier, and at the state level, the National Center for Cancer Research (CNIO) was created. ), in 1998.
«The first big change I noticed was the creation of the IACS. It improved a lot, since a management infrastructure was created, it housed an ethics committee, they helped with the calls...”, details Lanas. The deputy scientific director of the IIS and head of the Ophthalmology service at the Miguel Servet hospital, Luis Pablo Júlvez, agrees with him, adding: "the problem is that it was an entity external to the hospitals and unrelated to the university."
