Erick Riquelme, medical technologist: Scientist works to create the first Chilean cancer research network
12-23-19
12-23-19
The idea is to generate contacts between experts who study in isolation, to be able to share information, contribute to their projects and, in the future, generate a national center.
Erick Riquelme (43) returned to Chile six months ago after spending nine years working on cancer research at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas, one of the world's most important centers in this area. Now, back in the country, he works as a researcher at the Center for Integrative Biology (CIB) of the U. Mayor.
In the United States, together with a team of experts, he developed a research on pancreatic cancer that was published in one of the most prominent journals (Cell) and was selected as one of the ten most relevant works of 2019 by the board of the European Cancer Research Association.
The work detected the importance of diversity in the microbiota - bacterial flora - for the greater survival of patients.
Back in the country, Riquelme is focused on a new and complex challenge: to form the first network of Chilean researchers against the aforementioned disease.
"Cancer has always attracted my attention as a biological process, and although it is a catastrophic disease for many people, it attracts me from a biological point of view."
"My mother died of cancer and I always say it was a very hard experience, but it also allows you to realize that wanting to have someone with cancer is catastrophic."
Gather Efforts
The medical technologist says that since he was in college, cancer intrigued him as a biological process. After completing a master's and a doctorate at the Catholic University, one of his mentors invited him to Texas to continue working on the subject. There, he says, "every time I went down to eat at the casino I saw patients in gowns, with scars from surgery, hairless, very weak. That was a reminder, it made you see the reality of people, the impact that the cancer in lives."
Only two years after being in the United States, his mother was diagnosed in Chile with liver cancer and died shortly after.
"Watching my mother die of cancer was very hard, because I lived it from the United States," he says.
He adds that "fortunately I had the help of an oncologist who became a friend, and a key person in everything I want to do, Bruno Nervi." This is a Chilean doctor, president of the Chile Foundation without Cancer.
Since returning to the country, Riquelme has been committed to "building a network, going to talk with people, clinics, oncologists, surgeons, pathologists from different places to convince them".
The idea is to generate a contact network between cancer researchers who now work in isolation, be able to share information, contribute to their work and, in the future, generate the first research center in Chile.
A path with difficulties
So far he is already "working with teams from Puerto Montt, Concepción and the San Juan de Dios Hospital, but it is all through people I know to be able to approach and obtain patient samples to work and investigate," he says.
Riquelme says it hasn't been easy. "It is hard to convince the medical staff that we are going to do something positive," he says.
Currently, most hospitals throw biological samples in the trash as biopsies of cancer patients. However, according to Riquelme, for research "that is very relevant scientific information, which has a lot of value."
Regarding the future, he says that the goal is to "try to understand global cancer, from all sides. I want to try to do relevant things in cancer and the only way to do it is by interacting. That's what Science is all about."
