Shock in the Galician scientific community. The researcher Guillermo Pousada Fernández died last Sunday at the age of 40 due to cancer that he had been fighting for years.
As The Voice of Galicia has announced, the brilliant researcher saw his projection in 2022 halted when he discovered the mouth cancer he suffered from. During his career he achieved several academic distinctions and obtained a national award in 2021 for his work on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). It was at the time when his career was beginning to take off that illness stalked him.
Pousada received his doctorate in Biomedicine with a prize for the best thesis for his work on the genetic and molecular bases of pulmonary arterial hypertension, after graduating in Biology from the University of Vigo and obtaining a master’s degree in clinical trials from the University of Seville. .
Despite all his academic achievements, the researcher was unemployed. “The University of Vigo did not give me any alternative,” he lamented in an interview in the Galician media in 2017. “The contracts are based on the research projects. And right now, with all the cuts, they have greatly reduced those projects. In “The few that exist do not offer money to hire personnel. There are no funds to give me a contract.”
His struggle allowed him not to change country or profession and, at the age of 32, the American magazine Scientific Reports published his thesis. The research of the young man from Cangas de Onís would make it possible to design a diagnosis for patients with pulmonary hypertension that, depending on the genetic load of each patient, would allow them to be administered a specific treatment, thus increasing their life expectancy of about six years.
At the end of summer 2022 he was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma. Despite this, he took advantage of his situation to demand more investment from the Parliament of Galicia to “speed up the early detection of cancer.”
