Between 80% and 90% of extremely premature babies—those born before 28 weeks of gestation—suffer from anemia. To treat it, two-thirds of these infants require blood transfusions during the first weeks of life, but receiving adult blood carries some side effects. An Italian study published in 2025 demonstrated that transfusions of umbilical cord blood reduce the risk of pathologies common in premature infants, such as retinal, pulmonary, and circulatory problems, while also avoiding the complications associated with receiving adult blood. To demonstrate the viability of this transfusion technique, the Hospital Clínic Barcelona and the Blood and Tissue Bank (BST) conducted a clinical trial with 41 extremely premature babies with anemia, which yielded favorable results. The trial, presented at the Congress of European Societies of Neonatology, has passed its first phase, confirming that the infrastructure of Hospital Clínic and BST is suitable for performing cord blood transfusions. This makes the center a pioneer in Spain and "one of the only places in the world where we have a healthcare facility that allows for this technique," says Dr. Miquel Alsina, attending physician in the Neonatology Department at Hospital Clínic. He adds that they are already working on creating a multicenter study with six centers that can "treat as many children as possible when they need it."

Olga Federico, the bookseller at La Impossible bookstore, received devastating news in 2019: a diagnosis of very aggressive breast cancer. "They told me I would be going to the hospital many times. At first, you don't believe it, but it's true. And while I was there, I saw with great admiration all the patients' eagerness to collaborate in research," Federico explains. Once recovered from treatment, everything she had experienced continued to resonate with her, until she decided to take action and find a way to promote medical research. "Bookstores have a great capacity for mobilization. I spoke with the bookseller at Documenta, Èric del Arco, and then with my oncologist, Maria Vidal, and we quickly began to gather support," Federico recalls. That aspiration materialized in Girem Full, a solidarity initiative that combines reading with fundraising for cancer research, promoted by the Booksellers' Guild, the Hospital Clínic, and the Collserola Foundation. Awarded the Tatiana Sisquella Prize by ARA, Girem Full's latest edition saw the participation of some sixty bookstores and a hundred schools throughout Catalonia.

One in ten mothers will experience persistent sadness, lack of energy, and difficulty bonding with their baby in the first year after birth. These conditions can eventually lead to a mental health disorder such as postpartum depression. Although it can be treated with psychological and psychiatric therapy, as well as hospitalization in severe cases, there are no specific pharmacological therapies in Europe, and the available options—antidepressants and serotonin reuptake inhibitors—are too generic and take too long to work. However, in the United States, for two years now, you can access the Zurzuvae, a pill that is estimated to halve the symptoms associated with the disorder. This Wednesday, the European Commission authorized its marketing.

Entering Barcelona at the top of Diagonal has been a challenge for years. Right now, it's a busy road that pushes out residents and acts as a barrier to the area. But this could change. The construction of the future Clinical Health Campus It's an opportunity to redesign the border between Barcelona, Esplugues, and Hospitalet. To humanize it and make it more suitable for residents. The criteria document for defining an urban strategy for the Porta Diagonal – Campus Clínic area prepared by Barcelona Regional highlights a series of changes that go in this direction. The document proposes converting the Ronda de Dalt and the Diagonal, where it connects with the B-23, into two roads that are more urban than interurban.

In Barcelona, he was known as Bello Paolo. He was charismatic. Seductive. Persuasive. Some even called him Little Frankenstein. For what he did inside the operating room. Paolo Macchiarini was head of the thoracic surgery department at Barcelona's Hospital Clínic for four years, until his contract was terminated on December 1, 2009. He moved to Florence, where he spent a short time, and then went to Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, one of the most prestigious in the world, and later to Krasnodar, Russia. The documentary Bad Surgeon: Love under the Knife describes the therapeutic cruelty that Macchiarini inflicted on several patients from these countries. Many of them died in agony, and a Swedish court ultimately sentenced him to two and a half years in prison for aggravated assault on three patients to whom he transplanted a plastic trachea coated with stem cells. But the Italian crossed red lines outside of hospitals: he began a romantic relationship with the mother of one of the young men who died in his operating room.

When I read press releases about certain projects, I sometimes throw up my hands in horror. In the case of the Clínic, it is stated that construction will begin in 2030 and that the overall investment will be 1.7 billion euros. Will this schedule be viable? I believe it will only be feasible if, collectively, we are able to discern between what is critical for the hospital and what is critical for the city, and if the difficult issues are addressed from the outset. In other words: forming a consortium is relatively easy. Deciding what built legacy this consortium will leave in the metropolis over the next hundred years is more difficult and requires specialized medical knowledge, but also a certain humanistic perspective.

The future of the new Clínic-Universitat de Barcelona Health Campus is taking shape. The institutions are maintaining the opening schedule for the new hospital, university, and research complex. at the top of the Diagonal looking ahead to 2035, and therefore, this Monday the Joint Monitoring Committee – which involves the Generalitat, Barcelona City Council, Hospital Clínic, the University of Barcelona (UB), as well as the City Councils of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Esplugues de Llobregat and the Barcelona Provincial Council – announced that it plans to begin relocation work on 2035. Another new development announced is that the updated project to extend metro line L3 so that the Clínic and the Sant Joan de Déu Hospital share a station in the area has now been put out to tender.

The Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, baptized as Doctor Death in a documentary, entered in a Catalan prison in September 2024. The famous doctor was sentenced by a Swedish court to two and a half years in prison for serious assault on three patients between 2011 and 2014, to whom he transplanted a plastic trachea bathed in stem cells. As Macchiarini has lived in Catalonia since landing at the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona in 2004, in a luxurious villa in Cabrils, he requested to serve his sentence in a Catalan penitentiary, a request that was accepted by the National Court. Finally, after all possible appeals and once the sentence was final, Macchiarini entered the Quatre Camins prison.

In 2017, professionals at the Hospital Clínic performed the first infusion of a CAR-T treatment (from the Englishchimeric antigen receptor-T), a cell therapy that has already revolutionized the approach to some types of cancer. It consists of creating a drug with the patient's own cells: the white blood cells (T lymphocytes) are extracted, genetically reprogrammed in the laboratory to recognize tumor cells, and then reinfused to neutralize the cancer. Since then, the hospital has treated more than 500 patients with this type of immune therapy and has managed to eliminate the cancer in half of these cases. In this way, it has become a benchmark in Europe, being the only one to have developed two exclusively academic therapies that are already approved in Spain:Ari-0001, for severe patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and theAri-0002h, for patients with multiple myeloma.

Even before the pandemic we knew that the physical plant of some of our hospitals was not in good condition to face the 21st century. The fiscal constraints resulting from the 2008 and euro crises forced us to postpone renovation plans. The pandemic will bring them back on the agenda and, with European permission, make them fiscally feasible. Experience will also make us design them in a way that is adjusted to the new needs. In this respect, we can take advantage of the delay. But now we have to get on with it: the period of fiscal tolerance, availability of European funds and Keynesian propensities may not be very long. We must take advantage of the window of opportunity.

Ten years of research and over 6,000 pages of information that support its quality, safety and efficacy confirm that immunotherapy with CAR-T will be the treatment of the future for the most resistant leukaemia in Catalonia and Spain. A future that is becoming more and more immediate, since the Spanish Agency of Medicines and Health Products (Aemps) has authorised this Wednesday the exceptional and hospital use of CAR-T ARIO-0001 in severe patients with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. This promising gene therapy is based on the laboratory modification of the lymphocytes in charge of the immune response to make the body react and attack the tumour cells on its own. It is estimated that at least 25 people with leukaemia who do not respond to conventional treatments could be treated annually at the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona, which has developed this personalised medicine. For the time being, patients will have to be over 25 years old.