Dr. Manuel Desco Menéndez

Bio

Manuel Desco reached the degrees of MD, MSEng and PhD, and is specialist in Nuclear Medicine. He is Head of Service of the Research Dept. of the Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón in Madrid and lecturer at the Bioengineering and Aerospace Engineering Dept. of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Presently he also chairs the Spanish platform on Technological Innovation in Hospitals (ITEMAS).

He has worked as medical practitioner, entrepreneur and researcher in Biomedical Engineering. His research activities have mainly addressed the field of medical imaging, including the development of advanced techniques for image acquisition (MRI, PET, etc.) and postprocessing, either for quantification, multimodality registration or computer aided diagnosis. A significant amount of work has been devoted to the development of high-performance devices for small-animal molecular imaging, used in biomedical research. Presently, most efforts are devoted to foster and support innovation and technology transfer from Hospitals.

He has supervised 15 PhD Theses, published more than 400 papers and has participated or coordinated more than 70 national / international research projects and excellence networks (for instance, “Molecular and Multimodality Medical Imaging”, IM3, with 29 groups from all over the country, or ITEMAS, with more than 100 members).

Several developments from his Laboratory have been transferred to the industry, becoming commercial products with worldwide distribution.

Some relevant awards received were the UNICEM prize to technological innovation (2004) and Galien prize to best research trajectory (2008) or the award to innovative researcher 2013 from the Spanish forum of innovative enterprises. He is full member of the Spanish Academy of Medicine and Surgery (2014).

Acces to all scientifc publications: Link