Tec de Monterrey honors one of its students for his contribution to nanotechnology in medicine

Guillermo Ulises Ruiz-Esparza is the first Mexican to be awarded the Pegasus Future of Health Technology award by the MIT Media Lab. The recognition is for his innovative contributions to medicine and nanotechnology.

Guillermo is a physician at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. He noticed the suffering caused by heart failure during his first encounters with his patients. That was the first step in creating nano-vectors to help fight this pathology.

His thesis on the use of nanotechnology to treat heart failure was written while he was at the Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas. At that time, nanotechnology was solely focused on oncological diseases.

And it was the perfect opportunity for him to propose an innovative idea: how nanotechnology vectors can carry drugs and be targeted to specific tissue. The heart was no exception. This research earned Ulises several awards, such as MIT’s TR35, the Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Award, among others.

Ulises believes that the pandemic will help us better understand the importance of this technology. “Moderna, the company developing the COVID-19 vaccine, is implementing a method based on nanoparticles,” he said.

Besides his research and awards, this Mexican doctor and researcher intends to create a program that encourages young Hispanics to do research in Boston. His goal is to increase the number of Latin Americans in the field. The most important thing for Ulises is that his research will be useful in the future.

Sources: El Tiempo Latino and Tec.mx