Every year 1,400 new cases of childhood cancer are diagnosed in Spain. The five-year survival rate of children from zero to 14 years old reaches almost eighty percent, but the goal is to keep moving forward to achieve one hundred percent.
The CRIS Foundation Against Cancer and the Hospital de la Paz in Madrid have created the Unit for Research and Advanced Therapies in Childhood Cancer, unique in Spain, in which clinical trials will be developed where molecular engineering and immunotherapy will be protagonists.
The facilities, located on the eighth floor of the hospital are prepared to treat between 50 and 100 children and adolescents a year with difficult-to-solve cancers.
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This Unit is integrated into the child hemato-oncology and transplant service of the Hospital de la Paz. Doctors, researchers, nurses, geneticists and immunologists will collaborate to treat in a personalized way the most difficult cases of childhood cancer.
It is a commitment to on-site research, the development of innovative therapies through clinical trials, and an increasingly personalized and unique clinical practice for each patient.
The objective is to improve the diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of Children with cancer who have no alternative and offer them precision medicine.
In Babies and more Four years later, three girls and a boy recreate a viral photo that represents the fight against cancer Lola Manterola, cancer patient and vice president of CRIS Against Cancer explains:
“Childhood cancer is different from adult cancer, and the mechanisms that cause tumors to form in children are not known, nor are the reasons for their immune system not able to fight them, and this unit will help fight them, and develop new therapies and clinical trials, almost nonexistent in childhood cancer in our country. ”
What are the new therapies?
Pre-clinical research: look for new molecular, genetic and immunological targets in cancer-indicating stem cells, in which they produce metastasis and in which they cause relapses.
Design of early clinical trials: hematology oncology and pathology immunology in children.
Dr. Antonio Pérez, Head of the Pediatric Hemato-Oncology Service of the University Hospital of La Paz and director of the CRIS Unit for Research and Advanced Therapies in Childhood Cancer, explains:
"Immunotherapy and molecular oncohematology are providing new treatments that modulate the immune response and have a potent antitumor effect."
And he adds that they also intend to identify patients with a predisposition to cancer during pediatric age "and that could be very relevant to modify the clinical practice and to establish earlier, more effective treatments and with less side effects".
The latest cell therapies
It is one of the treatments that are being developed in the Unit. They provide the patient with immune system troops strengthened and specialized in destroying tumors.
But they require very precise and delicate cell manipulation, which must be done under very high standards of sterility and automation.
Hence it has been acquired for the new Unit, Clinimacs Prodigy (Miltenyi Biotec), a technology that allows the direct introduction of donor cells, their isolation, improvement, activation, multiplication and specialization, and their introduction back into the patient, without any direct contact between the cells and the researcher.
This type of technology provides not only good treatments, but allows entry into large national and international collaborative clinical trials.
Cutting-edge facilities
The CRIS Foundation Against Cancer has financed the construction of this Unit located on the 8th Floor of the Mother and Child Hospital of the University Hospital of La Paz, in Madrid. It includes:
10 rooms, of which 4 state-of-the-art isolation rooms for hematopoietic progenitor transplants (the most immature stem cells, needed after chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments).
Clinical trials area.
Treatment preparation area.
Specialized laboratory
Work area for researchers, clinicians and clinical trial monitors.
If you want to walk through the facilities of a new Unit for Research and Advanced Therapies in Childhood Cancer, you can do so through this video.
Photos | CRIS Foundation against cancer
