In a ceremony held at the CosmoCaixa Science Museum, the “la Caixa” Foundation presented the grants to the 33 projects from Spain and Portugal selected in the 2023 call.
The last 23rd November 2023, the “la Caixa” Foundation hosted an event to award grants to 33 research projects in biomedicine and health. These projects will be conducted in various research centres, hospitals, and universities in Spain and Portugal. They were selected within the framework of the CaixaResearch call for Health Research 2023, which aims to promote outstanding biomedical research with significant social impact in basic, clinical, and translational research.
One of the projects selected within the framework of the CaixaResearch call for Health Research projects 2023 was the research project coordinated by the CNIO researcher, Manuel Valiente, which will be developed with the CNIO Biobank Unit and the Bioinformatics Group.
Manuel Valiente (CNIO Brain Metastasis Group), Eva Ortega-Paíno (CNIO Biobank) and Fátima Al-Shahrour (CNIO Bioinformatics Unit), CaixaResearch Health 2023 ceremony.
The awarded project aims to test a new treatment strategy against brain metastasis by working directly on patient samples, for which it has been endowed with more than 490,000 euros, that will allow this research to be conducted over the next three years.
On many occasions, cancer patients have poor prognosis because the primary tumour disseminate and take over additional organs impairing
their function. Nowadays, therapeutic decisions are based on the primary tumour ignoring whether the metastatic cells might or might not respond to the same therapy, since they evolve in a different place of the body.
“Metastasis requires comprehensive treatments not only dictated by the primary tumour conditions. Here, we propose a paradigm change by developing a genomically guided precision medicine pipeline to improve the effectiveness of brain metastasis treatment.”, Valiente explains.
The project team will try to answer whether it is possible to develop a more comprehensive cancer treatment plan that provides drugs not only effective for the primary tumour but also for metastases, by establishing a pioneer strategy to personalize the treatment of one of the most-difficult-to-treat and deadliest metastases, which are those that grow in the brain. This proof-of-concept study will be possible due to the national network of brain metastasis RENACER and the computational approach applied on a novel drug-screening Platform (METPlatform) in patient samples. A strategy based on the information provided by the genes and their alterations to guide treatment and diagnosis of this disease will be created.
Group photo of the researchers awarded in the CaixaResearch Health 2023 call. Credit: La Caixa Foundation
In this 6th edition of the CaixaResearch Call for Health Research, among the 493 proposals submitted, the 33 selected projects aim to address health challenges such as infectious diseases, neurosciences (7), cardiovascular and related metabolic diseases (7), and oncology (6).
