Monday, October 23, 2023, 01:25
The ‘la Caixa’ Foundation will allocate 3.3 million euros to promote 29 innovative biomedical projects with the capacity to reach the market and society. These are projects developed in 20 research centers, hospitals and universities in Spain and Portugal, and selected within the framework of the 2023 call of the new CaixaImpulse Health Innovation program. The initiative aims to encourage research to leave the laboratory and reach patients in the form of solutions capable of contributing to improving their health.
In this call, two projects from the University of Murcia have been selected. The researcher Pilar Coy, from this same academic institution, leads the first of them, a project that receives 149,500 euros from the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation to promote the design of a minimally invasive uterine fluid collection device to improve cancer detection of endometrium.
Currently, endometrial cancer is diagnosed through the analysis of tissue obtained in an endometrial biopsy, which is painful and, due to the scarcity of the sample collected, provides an inaccurate diagnosis in 55% of cases. This forces us to resort to more complex and expensive interventions, such as hysteroscopy, to diagnose these patients. Consequently, it is necessary and urgent to develop an effective and less invasive test to detect this type of tumors.
Uterine fluid has great potential as a source of specific biomarkers for endometrial cancer. However, there are no adequate devices on the market that allow it to be collected, since those on the market provide samples that are either contaminated by the bleeding that occurs during aspiration of the fluid, or diluted by the use of washings.
The project’s driving team has designed a device that allows pure, uncontaminated uterine fluid to be collected through capillary action, in an effective and minimally invasive manner. In this phase of the project, the objective is to obtain a mold that allows this device to be manufactured from a biocompatible material. Initially, it is intended to produce 200 units and carry out a feasibility study on patients from two hospitals to validate the medical device.
Promising results
For her part, researcher Rut Valdor, also from the University of Murcia, leads another project, endowed with 150,000 euros from the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation, which is developing a new cell therapy to stop the growth of glioblastomas, a type of very aggressive brain tumor with very high mortality.
In previous studies, the team has achieved promising results by acting on the pericytes of the brain, cells that surround blood vessels and that have a defense function that is affected by cancer cells, which favors the progression of glioblastoma through a mechanism known as chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA). Researchers have developed a method to isolate and use genetically modified pericytes without AMC as a tool with potential use in the treatment of glioblastoma and that could possibly be used for other types of cancer.
The results obtained so far by the team are promising, both in ‘in vitro’ and ‘in vivo’ models. At this stage, the project will focus its efforts on the development of a preclinical study to validate the effectiveness of this new therapeutic strategy using an animal model based on mice that develop human glioblastoma. In addition, a manufacturing process for modified pericytes from human fat will be established that meets the efficacy and toxicity requirements to be used as a possible future medicine.
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Results of the call
By business area, 13 of the projects belong to the field of therapies, 9 to diagnosis, 5 to medical devices and 2 to digital health. Regarding financing, the winners receive, depending on the degree of maturity of the project, between 50,000 and 500,000 euros to develop it in the following 2 years. The program allows that, when projects reach specific development milestones and after an assessment by the evaluation committee, they can advance to subsequent phases with greater financing.
The ‘la Caixa’ Foundation has maintained its commitment to innovation and transfer in biomedicine and health since 2015, when the entity created the first support program. To date, the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation has allocated 21.3 million euros to support 202 projects, which have led to the creation of 42 ‘spin-offs’ (derived companies), which in turn have obtained additional co-financing , through other competitive calls or private investors, worth more than 100 million euros.
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