Reading and fighting cancer, two good purposes merged by the Girem Full campaign, an initiative that aims to raise funds for research into cancer immunotherapy through the promotion of books.
Starting today, coinciding with World Poetry Day, and until April 23, Sant Jordi Day, the Gremi de Llibreters de Catalunya, the Fundació Collserola and the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona join forces to carry out the campaign: each book read will provide funds for 10 minutes of research; every six, one hour.
“You buy a book, you read it and when you return to the bookstore you fill out the campaign bookmark with your review of the work, you put it in the mailbox of the bookstore or the Clínic – or you write your review on the Girem Full website – and it automatically becomes 20 euros, which is 10 minutes of research.” This is how Enric del Arco, president of the Gremi de Llibreters, explains the process.
The same procedure is applied in schools that want to join: reading, review and donation from the funds raised by the campaign. “We have done some testing and donors have started to come out, we have created a tool to generate donations,” explains Del Arco, who values “the dissemination of reading in educational centers at a time when they tell us that reading comprehension has decreased ”.
With the support of reading sponsors who join in to collaborate financially, the promoters set themselves the challenge of reaching 1,000 hours of research. For Aleix Prat, director of the Clínic Cancer Institute, the campaign has all the necessary elements to be a success: “We connect with culture, education, schools and society, so that we are all participants in what is happening. From the point of view of a researcher, it is very satisfying that society understands what we do and supports it. We have to do the exercise of going out, explaining what we do, what the difficulties are, how we could go faster… This helps us connect, especially with the children, who are the ones who should benefit from the treatments.”
Cellular immunotherapy is one of the main lines of research at the Clínic-Idibaps, “a tool with enormous potential,” says Prat: “It involves extracting those from patients, taking them to the laboratory, training them, manipulating them and reintegrating them into the patient”.
The Clínic has been focused on immunotherapy for a decade with the ARI project, which promoted the development of CAR-T therapies for the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemias, multiple myeloma, and lymphoma, and in the coming months a trial will begin for the treatment of breast cancer.
“We want to continue along this line,” says the oncologist. “For us it is strategic to continue promoting CAR-T therapy not only in leukemia and other hematological tumors but also in solid cancers such as breast cancer, for which we will have a CAR-T next year, and others such as brain tumors, melanoma or lung cancer.”
Olga Federico, from the La Impossible bookstore, conceived the idea of combining books and research in a campaign after suffering from breast cancer, for which she was treated at the Clínic, in 2018. “I was looking for a way to turn this experience into something participatory and I wanted to do it from my field, which is the world of books,” he says.