History of the Department
The Medicine and Surgery Department (DIMEC) was founded on 1st January 2017 through the merging of four pre-existing Departments: Clinical and Experimental Medicine (MCS), Biotechnological and Translational Biomedical Sciences (SBiBiT), Neurosciences and Surgical Sciences, which now are departmental Units. Rationalization and sharing of administrative services were the main objectives of the aggregation, together with the expression of a large Faculty, sufficient to provide the multifaceted competences and skills necessary to support interdisciplinary research, health care, and both under- and post-graduate courses of medicine and surgery, dentistry, medical biotechnologies, physical education and health professions.
The Department coordinates 10 first level degrees, 4 second level degree, 2 single cycle degree programmes, 1 interuniversity degree courses, 3 doctoral and 35 specialization schools.
Mission
The department integrates the scientific expertise from various research groups. Various specializations are comprised in this Department, ranging from Medical Statistics (MED/01) to Applied Medical Techniques (MED/50), but also including some of physical, biological and psychological scientific disciplinary sectors. Specific medical areas cover prevention, diagnosis, therapy, prognosis and rehabilitation of human diseases, integrating clinical and surgical approaches, as well as multi-dimensional diagnosis and through basic and translational laboratory sciences. The main research fields of the Department may be synthesized in: Prevention, Predictive medicine, Personalized medicine. Epidemiological, clinical and basic knowledge may contribute to both primary and secondary prevention, allowing the identification and removal of risk factors involved in chronic degenerative multi-factorial diseases, which are presently the most prevalent in the general population, but also covering transmissible infectious diseases and other pathologies. - The same information is aimed at developing predictive medicine that may suggest prognosis, and the effectiveness of therapeutic intervention on the basis of complex information that may be applied in different situations through genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic analysis. Joint efforts by different research groups can maximize the effectiveness of preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic interventions by applying the principles of personalized medicine, which consider the individual phenotype resulting from genetically determined or acquired characteristics. Novel therapeutic targets and molecular therapies in malignant hemopoietic diseases are studied. These considerations require the interdisciplinary contribution of different skills and abilities working in an integrated context. The goals of the Department consist in teaching abilities at the patient's bedside and in the continual research of pathophysiological causes of clinical conditions through research on animal models and in human cells. Thus, the department can rely on a wide range of different scientific and disciplinary sectors.
