Dr. Barcia is a professor at UCV and also has been lecturing Anatomy to bachelor and master students for the past 20 years. Currently he is also in charge of the doctoral school at UCV. He supervised 9 doctoral theses and he is supervising right now 2 PhD students. Jorge Miguel Barcia Gonzalez defended the PhD in 2004 at UCH-CEU while working as assistant professor in human anatomy at UCH-CEU and research work on neurobiology supervised by Dr Romero.
During this period, the focus of the research was on the neural effects of diabetes and different drugs (ethanol, MDMA and cocaine). Concretely, the research was oriented to study morphologic and functional changes in retina and hippocampus. In July 2011, part of the lab team was moved to UCV and the research topic targeted retinal pigmented epithelium (RPE) and its biology under different oxidative challenges. The lab has described responses in ARPE-19 and extracellular vesicle release as response to oxidative stimuli.
In the last years the lab group is particularly interested on the modulatory role of miRNAs (extracellular vesicle cargo) in eye-related neovascularization after oxidative insults e.g. high glucose or ethanol. Oxidative induced neovascularization is a critical point involved in age related macular degeneration (AMD) or diabetic retinopathy (RD). The standard treatment on these diseases goes to anti-VEGF treatment and the aim of the research is to find promising alternatives against retinal neovascularization.