🔬An international consortium, led by #IRBBarcelona & the biotech company @MerusNV, reports the discovery of MCLA-158, the first clinical candidate screened in #organoids targeting 🎯 #cancer#stemcells of solid tumors.
Named Petosemtamab, the antibody MCLA-158 prevents the onset of #metastasis (that is, the spread of #cancer to other vital organs) and slows the growth of primary tumours in experimental models of cancer.
The study also lays the groundwork for the use of #organoids in the #DrugDiscovery process undertaken by pharmaceutical companies.
Organoids are patient-derived samples that can be grown in the laboratory, and they reproduce certain aspects of the tumour compartment.
For the development and characterisation of this antibody, researchers from HUB Organoids built a large biobank comprising organoids derived from patients with colon cancer, organoids from colon cancer metastasis to the liver, and organoids from normal non-cancerous tissue.
Dr. @BatlleLab: "It's highly satisfying to see that our discoveries are helping patients. We started studying cancer stem cells 15 years ago. The journey has been exciting & very complex. It has required a large investment of resources & great deal of work by many researchers.
#IRBScience: Published in @GenomeMedicine, the latest work from the SBNB lab points to the co-occurrence of #cancer driver genes as a key to precision medicine.
The system is called Targeted Cancer Therapy for You (TCT4U), and it's aimed at predicting tumour response to different treatments.💊
It has allowed the identification of a set of complex biomarkers🧬that have now been made available to the medical-scientific community.
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"The sum of two or more mutated #Cancer driver genes affects the tumour's response to treatments" says @ptck72, "through this work, we see that studying cancer driver genes as a whole can bring about a great advance towards precision medicine".
@Eduard_puig is one of the committed scientists who recently made an important contribution to the field.
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In June, @Eduard_puig, @SoniaCiudad and Natalia Carulla, among others, revealed the specific ensembles of Aβ protein that have the capacity to disrupt the membrane of neurons, causing their death.
@IRBBarcelona coordinates the European Project Evomet to train 15 young scientists and future leaders in metastasis research with the aim to identify therapeutic solutions. The project has received €4 M and will last for four years.
Each of the institutions will host one of the selected young researchers and will train them until they complete their doctorate, except for @IRBBarcelona and @idibell_cat IDIBELL, which will host two predoctoral researchers each.
#IRBScience: The @bbglab publishes "A compendium of mutational cancer driver genes" in @NatureRevCancer, with mportant implications in clinical decision making.
📢568 genes identified with the potential to trigger #cancer!
The study stands on the analysis of the genomes of 28,000 tumours from 66 types of cancer and it's a major update of the #IntOGen platform (intogen.org), aimed at identifying mutational cancer driver genes.
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“The compendium of driver genes provides cancer researchers, both in the clinical and basic research setting, with crucial knowledge and it has an important impact on clinical decision-making,” says @nlbigas, head of the @bbglab at @IRBBarcelona and @icreacommunity.
📢TLK protein inhibition activates the innate #ImmuneSystem, thus becoming a potential therapeutic target for enhancing the effect of some #cancer treatments.
“The activation of innate immunity in cancer has recently become an active area of research as it has become clear that the innate immune response influences chemotherapy and immunotherapy,” comments @genstability, who recently took up a new position at @theNCI.
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“This could help us understand our previous observation that TLK depletion caused replication stress and help us exploit the effects of TLK depletion for cancer therapy,” says @ssurebayona, first author of the study, now a postdoc at @TheCrick and #IRBAlumni.
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