More than 30 students arrived at UFRO this semester, what confirms the strong international partnerships of UFRO and the perceived high academic quality.

Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO) continues its path of internationalisation and welcomes through the International Affairs Office the foreign and national students who join the faculties and programmes of the university this semester.

The deputy rector, Dr. Rodrigo Navia Diez, was very pleased to receive the group of 30 students, who came to this regional and public university for professional, but also cultural and personal growth.

“The academic part is only one part of the challenge. There is also the personal development, when you are part of a different local and university community, with all its environmental, sportive and cultural opportunities,” Navia said.

INTERNATIONALISATION AT THE UNDERGRADUATE LEVEL

During this first semester of 2023, UFRO receives these students from different European and Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, the United States, Spain, Finland, Italy and Mexico, who will be part of the different study programs at the six faculties of Universidad de La Frontera.

Apart from the cooperation and mobility agreements between UFRO and universities in different parts of the world, which allow the mobility of these students, some of them also benefit from different scholarships, for example through the exchange program of the International Federation of Medical Students Associations (IFMSA) or the Fulbright Scholarship Program.

One of the students from Universidad Mariana in Colombia came to UFRO to participate in the Interdisciplinary Rural Internship Program of the UFRO Faculty of Medicine, and to carry out an internship in the rural areas of Melipeuco in the La Araucanía Region.

NATIONAL MOBILITY

In terms of national mobility, two students from Universidad de Antofagasta in the north of Chile will spend this semester at the Faculty of Engineering and Science and a student from Universidad de Los Lagos in the south of Chile will spend a semester at the Faculty of Medicine.

IMPRESSIONS

	Kaat Camps, KU Leuven, Belgium “My university has an agreement with UFRO, so I will carry out my internship here and take some classes of the Engineering in Natural Resources programme. I travelled to the north of Chile some years ago and the nature, the forests and the kindness of the people simply made me come back.”
	Heloisa Dos Santos, Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil “Student mobility is a great way to learn a new language and UFRO is known as one of the best universities in Chile, so I wanted to come here. I am studying journalism and I signed up for some of the assignments related to television journalism, since this is one of the fields I want to learn more about.”
	César Corona, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico “I am studying Industrial Economics and among the countries in Latin America, Chile has a very stable economy with good progress. I wanted to get to know the country and UFRO because of its Business Administration programme, because I heard very positive comments from the Mexican students who came here before.”
	Peter Olsen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark “I came from Copenhagen in Denmark, because I took an opportunity that opened up in the IFMSA exchange programme, which is a great opportunity for medical students to share ideas and realise projects on issues related to social responsibility, public health, reproductive health and community health education.”
	Ayelen Barría, University of Los Lagos, Chile “I always wanted to study at UFRO, but it was difficult for me to move to another city. That is why I applied through the National Mobility Programme for studying a semester at UFRO in the Obstetrics and Child Care programme, when I had the chance.”

CEBIM developed a seminar to present the advances in research about cancer treatment, led by Dr. Paulo Pardi, Dr. Cristian Paz and Dr. Iván González.

The Centre for Biomedical and Morpho-Functional Sciences (CEBIM) of Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO) had some months of intense work. Apart from several seminars for scientific dissemination, which have already led to promising partnerships and collaborations with peers from national and foreign universities in the field of cancer treatment with ancestral medicinal plants, they are preparing a Master’s Degree Programme in Science with Specialisation in Phytomedicine.

In this context, CEBIM held its third seminar on collaboration and dissemination of science, called ‘Interdisciplinary Studies on Cancer Treatment’, where Cristian Paez of Universidad de La Frontera (Chile), Paulo Pardi from University Centre Eniac in São Paulo (Brazil), and Ivan Gonzalez of Universidad de Concepción (Chile) shared the results of their studies carried out in this field of knowledge.

The director of CEBIM, Cristian Paz, pointed out: “We held this seminar with the invited speakers in order to present the main achievements we obtained, our high impact publications, as well as studies on bioactive principles in ancestral medicinal plants that are used in Mapuche medicine and have anticancer properties. We have investigated two of them in particular, since they have a marked anticancer activity – we were able to isolate two active molecules that show very strong activity against prostate cancer”.

The plants they study with a focus on their positive effects on humans are “Podanthus mitiqui” (Mitique or Palo Negro) and “Drimys Winteri” (Winter’s Bark or Canelo). “Our goal is to obtain natural compounds and to carry out a validation of these products to develop new formulations of natural origin that could be used in different treatments. Therefore, we still need to carry out more scientific and pharmacological studies with regard to these plants,” explained Cristian Paz.

“We organised several meetings on cancer treatment in collaboration with professor Pardi and with academics from Brazil, for the validation of Palo Negro-compounds and the progress in animals, to get to the next stage of its application in humans afterwards. In addition, we have active compounds, extracted from a plant, that have a significant effect on parasites, with a very powerful pharmacological effect,” he added.

CEBIM

CEBIM started a year and a half ago and consists of ten academics, who, in this time, carried out several academic activities and collaborated with other centres, considering the possibility to create a new Master’s Degree Programme in Sciences with Specialisation in Phytomedicine. The first call for this programme is projected for the year 2024.

“The dissemination seminars allow us to present and make known CEBIM and the work of the Faculty of Medicine, as well as to find and strengthen our national and international partnerships for collaborations. Those are also visible through the 12 articles we published over the last year and a half, as well as the three seminars we carried out,” concluded Dr. Paz.

The academic Dr. Fernando Lanas Zanetti of the Centre of Excellence in Training, Research and Management for Evidence-based Health (CIGES) and the Department of Internal Medicine, is part of the work group that will develop a general framework for the treatment of these two pathologies that are the leading cause of death in Chile and other parts of the world.

The first meeting of the committee took place in New Orleans, with experts from different parts of the world and Dr. Fernando Lanas Zanetti as a representative of South America. The goal is to work together on a document that provides guidelines and a strategic framework for Ministries of Health all over the world, considering the conditions of the different countries.

The academic Dr. Fernando Lanas Zanetti of the CIGES Centre of Excellence and the Department of Internal Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine of Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO), is part of this work group that will develop a general framework for the treatment of these two pathologies that are the leading cause of death in Chile and other parts of the world.

In this context, it is worth mentioning that the World Health Organisation had a strong focus on preventive aspects, such as COVID-19 vaccines, the eradication of malaria and other infectious diseases, but also of chronic diseases, cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Other preventive aspects were campaigns against smoking or for the control of blood pressure, cholesterol and obesity, but this approach has changed.

“The WHO realised that these measures were insufficient to meet the goal of decreasing the mortality from chronic diseases by 2030. That is why they decided to explore a new area for them, which is the treatment of heart attacks and strokes, which are the leading cause of death in Chile and other parts of the world,” commented Dr. Lanas.

Thus, WHO set up a group of experts from different countries around the world to develop treatment strategies for acute coronary syndrome (pre-heart attack and heart attack) and strokes. After the first meeting, global experts and the WHO directors for chronic and cardiovascular diseases focused on the three critical areas of global failure. The first one is related to heart attacks, strokes and the medical capacity to unclog arteries.

PREVALENCE OF HEART ATTACKS AND STROKES

“The vast majority of heart attacks is caused by a complete or partial blockage of a heart artery, while strokes are mainly caused by a blood clot that blocks or narrows an artery leading to the brain. These blood clots can be destroyed with special intravenous medication or a catheter and a special balloon, but you have to act quickly, because once the artery is clogged, the neurons or heart muscle fibres begin to die and the more time you wait after the first symptoms, the more damage is done. After a certain lapse of time, it is not worth doing anything anymore, because there will only be dead cells left that will scar the person for life, if the person survives,” explained the cardiologist Dr. Lanas.

That is why it is important to recognise the symptoms and to know what to do. Therefore, the different governments and their health services need to launch educational campaigns that make people more conscious about the presence of symptoms and that teach them about when to occur to a doctor. “The faster the better,” the cardiologist affirmed.

The second aspect is to train the health teams, so they recognise when a heart attack or stroke is on the way. “First, you have to see the physical exam, which is an electrocardiogram that needs to be interpreted by a specialist. In Chile, we have an advanced online transmission system that transmits the data to a 24/7 central control centre in our capital city Santiago de Chile, where a cardiologist prepares an immediate report. If there are signs of a heart attack, the patient must be referred to an establishment where this procedure can be done – in Temuco, it is the public ‘Hospital Dr. Hernán Henríquez’ or the private clinic ‘Clínica Alemana’ – so the referral system has to be fast for patients who live more isolated. Another option is the use of thrombolytic medicine that dissolves the clots. They are available in all of our emergency services,” Dr. Lanas explained.

The registry of the PURE project in Temuco shows that, currently, there are more strokes than heart attacks. Out of 100 heart attacks, 75 occur in men; women present fewer heart attacks and at a more advanced age. Strokes occur more evenly in men and women, on average 10 years after a heart attack. “A stroke is more complex than a heart attack, because the crucial exam is a brain scan, which is not available everywhere,” said Dr. Lanas.

The third important aspect is to have a clear referral system that includes all health services, which is more complex for arterial procedures and brain scans. “We are advancing with that in Chile, but there are a lot of countries in the world that are not. We have access to thrombolytic drugs or other drugs such as aspirin or those that lower the cholesterol level. The WHO will work with the health ministries around the world to implement these measures and to see if we can reduce cardiovascular mortality by 30% by 2030,” concluded Dr. Lanas.

In Chile, we already made a lot of progress regarding the aspects that are part of the strategic framework, although there are still a lot of details missing. The aim of the global strategy led by WHO, in which Dr. Fernando Lanas plays a leading role, is to make further progress, but in all countries in the world.

The scientist Dr. Alexis Gaete and the biologist Cristian Arenas went to the Ecology Glacier to take permafrost, moraine, and rhizospheric soil samples.

With the aim of carrying out an expedition to the Antarctic and taking different types of soil samples to evaluate changes in the dynamics of the microorganisms that live there, two researchers of the project ‘Antarctic microbiology of climate change: unearthing unknown virulence and resistance genes’ (mBioClim), led by Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO), travelled to the Ecology Glacier, which is located nearby the Polish base ‘Henryk Arctowski’ on King George Island.

“This expedition directly contributes to the different fields of research, which the researchers and experts who are part of mBioClim work in. In addition, it is also a great contribution to the national scientific and technological work,” assures the researcher Alexis Gaete, who is specialised in microorganisms in extreme environments such as the Antarctic Peninsula, as well as his colleague Cristian Arenas, a biologist and support researcher, who also works on the mBioClim project.

During their expedition, the researchers collected soil samples of different states of freezing, such as permafrost soil (frozen soil), moraine soil (recently thawed soil due to glacier retreat) and rhizospheric soil (completely thawed soil colonised by plants).

In addition, they collected springtail specimens of the species Cryptopygus antarcticus, which is an arthropod endemic to Antarctica that lives in the rhizosphere and is able to tolerate extreme cold conditions. Dr. Gaete pointed out that these species are very interesting, “because they eat the bacteria and fungi that live in the decomposing matter, so in some way they regulate the soil transportation and interactions of soil organisms”.

Apart from the study of the diversity of bacteria present in each of the types of soil and the arthropods, for the researchers it is essential to know if there are microorganisms with virulence and antibiotic resistance genes in recently exposed soils due to thaws.