Ramon Cugat, full academician of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), presented to the academicians, collaborators and friends of the RAED the trajectory and challenges of the García Cugat Foundation, which he himself founded and chairs. The event was accompanied by an extraordinary concert organized by RAED with the collaboration of the Royal Artistic Circle of Barcelona and Jorquera Pianos, which was held on September 26. The recital was given by the renowned pianist Facundo González Laborde, who performed works by Claude Debussy, Astor Piazzolla, Alberto Williams and Johannes Brahms.
The García Cugat Foundation aims to promote research in the area of health and well-being of citizens by developing new biological therapies and the diagnostic, preventive, curative and rehabilitative aspects of diseases associated with aging, public health and new therapeutic weapons. Its scientific activity over ten years has made it an international benchmark in the application of biological therapies in veterinary science, medicine and scientific research.
Facundo González, pianist
The foundation brings together a group of companies, individual professionals and research institutes and public and private universities, providing added value to the scientific activity developed. Its purpose is to boost productivity and employment generation in different sectors, both private and public. Currently, one of its major challenges is focused on osteoarthritis of the knee, an intra-articular disease that causes pain and functional disability and that affects a large part of the population. This is one of the main reasons why they go to the doctor’s office.
With age this disease worsens and affects a greater number of people, so that if among adults it’s possible to talk about figures of 52% of those affected, in segments of the older population it may be speaking of 85%. In 2010, 15% of the population of the United States suffered from osteoarthritis and it’s estimated that worldwide the total number of affected is around 250 million people. This supposes an expenditure of 128,000 million dollars in health care only in the United States.
Conventional medical treatments are only a patch to the problem and also have negative repercussions on the patients’ health since they affect other devices and systems. On the other hand, they also have negative effects on the economy because of the pharmaceutical expenditure they imply. The regenerative medicine in which the García Cugat Foundation works proposes a radical change.
