Every day we make hundreds of decisions: choosing a certain path, stopping at a traffic light, trusting someone or not… And the curious thing is that many of these decisions are made before we’re even aware of them. It’s as if our brain had a kind of autopilot that enables us to act quickly, guiding our choices almost imperceptibly. But do we know how it works and why it decides what it does? Are we truly free, or are we dependent on it?

Behind every decision lie invisible, complex processes that researchers such as Joseph Paton, Director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme and Principal Investigator at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon,

Every advance begins with a question. Physicians in classical Greece wondered what the abnormal tissue was that grew uncontrollably and affected their patients’ health. They called it karkinos (“crab”) because of its hardness and resemblance to the crustacean and the word we still use today comes from that term.

2,400 years later, we now know there are over 200 types of cancer. Cancer isn’t a single disease but many, and it requires many questions. In this article, we’ve compiled some of the doubts sent to us by our community and tackle them together with two experts in clinical practice and research.

Elisa Espinet, a researcher for ”la Caixa” Foundation Health Research and Group Leader at the Pancreatic Cancer Laboratory of the Barcelona University’s Faculty of Medicine and the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL),

Over the past year, advances in medicine and health have filled the headlines on social media, in blogs and newspapers, reminding us that research never stops.

Each new discovery brings us a little closer to the headline we long to see, a utopia which may be different for each of us – “Causes of Alzheimer’s revealed”; “Cure for cancer discovered”… – and which researchers are seeking to bring about through one key factor: innovation. With this combination of creativity, collaboration and entrepreneurship, they’re working to transform their findings into solutions that reach society, making possible what once seemed impossible.

That’s why we asked the researchers from our network what their dream headline for 2026 is and how they’re innovating to turn their utopia into a reality.

“They’ve described how the immune system regulates the skin’s resilience”, “They’ve revealed the role played by a group of cells in the aggressiveness of tumours”, “They’ve developed a new vaccine that trains the immune system to attack cancer”…

Behind every headline on social media and in the science and health sections of blogs and newspapers there’s much more than a discovery: there’s dedication, hard work and collaboration.

Every day, researchers and multidisciplinary teams in laboratories, hospitals and universities are working to design new therapeutic strategies and to decipher the mechanisms that give rise to diseases.

And who better than those people themselves to tell us,

Health research and innovation are constantly evolving. Year after year, scientists around the world refine their strategies and laboratory techniques to tackle the greatest challenges of the moment.

And as science advances, our society, our way of life and our environment also change, resulting in new challenges and, with them, new research.

The researchers in our network are an example of how science continues to innovate in the face of the most substantial problems of our time, and the aim of this blog is to highlight their advances and knowledge in the different areas of health. Today we share with you the 12 most noteworthy articles of 2025.

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