Fundación la Caixa continues to bet on research. As a result, its general manager, Antonio Vila Bertrán; the general director of the Clínic hospital, Josep Maria Campistol, and the director of the Frcb-Idibaps, Elías Campo, have signed the renewal of the collaboration between these institutions to improve people’s health through immunotherapy programs against cancer and of translational research.
During the 2023-2026 period, the la Caixa Foundation will support the Clínic with 4.6 million euros to promote the “cellular immunotherapy programme: from research to assistance”, developed by the CaixaResearch immunotherapy research unit, as well as as well as the CaixaResearch program for translational cancer research, and will continue to support the Bitrecs programme.
“Improving people’s health and quality of life is one of the founding objectives of our entity”, explains Antonio Vila Bertrán, general director of the la Caixa Foundation. “To get closer to this goal –he continues-, we collaborate closely with institutions that are true benchmarks in their fields, such as the Cancer Immunotherapy Clinic. Thanks to its researchers, dedicated to finding new treatment alternatives, innovative products are being developed in the clinical field that manage to change lives”.
The Fundación la Caixa will launch a corporate campaign next week in which value will be given to the work of researchers. Starring Dr. Manel Juan, head of the immunology service at the Clínic-Idibaps hospital’s biomedical diagnostic center (and head of the CaixaResearch immunotherapy research unit), the campaign highlights the great social impact that today’s research can have in our health of tomorrow.
“The collaboration with Fundación la Caixa reflects the vocation of the three entities in the comprehensive care of patients, offering the necessary support and accompaniment to both them and their families”, says Dr. Campistol. “At the Clínic-Idibaps we will continue to promote research of excellence in the field of immunotherapy, both to deal with oncological diseases and diseases of immune origin.”
The hospital already has, Campistol explains, “two CAR-Ts for the treatment of leukemia and myeloma”: “Our goal is to bring these innovative therapies and others that we develop to the maximum number of people possible.”
The Fundación la Caixa, according to Dr. Elías Campo, “helps in two great challenges of current biomedical research”. One, to promote collaboration between basic researchers and clinicians to solve the most pressing problems in clinical practice; and two, to encourage interest in this translational research among young doctors. “These are two aspects that lay the foundations to quickly transfer the results of the research to the clinic,” he adds.
The Fundación la Caixa and the Hospital Clínic will continue to collaborate to enhance the current capacities of the CaixaResearch immunotherapy research unit, inaugurated in 2019 under the leadership of Dr. Manel Juan.
Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that helps the patient’s own immune system fight the disease by removing its cells and modifying them to attack cancer effectively, something that represents a change in strategy with respect to therapies traditional oncology, such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy.
To continue promoting this academic path, the la Caixa Foundation will support the work of the CaixaResearch immunotherapy research unit with 4 million euros from 2023 to 2026. This will allow the development of new cellular immunotherapy products for the treatment of cancer patients or those with other diseases Immunotherapy, from basic research to approval for clinical use, at least under hospital exemption.
There are four lines of work: development of methods to improve new cellular immunotherapy products; cell vaccine production and new clinical trials; production of cellular immunotherapy based on natural specific T cells, based on genetically modified T cells (CAR-T).
As a result of a prior agreement between both institutions (2019-2022), the unit has already developed some new treatments based on cellular immunotherapy for those cancer patients who had already exhausted all the lines of conventional treatment and available clinical trials, for which They had no other therapeutic alternatives.
