2024-04-27 11:00:44
“In laboratories, the word cancer is not scary. But when they tell you that you are the one who has cancer, everything changes,” explains the researcher. Meritxell Rovira. For years, this scientist has investigated this disease behind a microscope until one day, at the age of 35, she herself was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I went through everything from chemotherapy to hormone treatment, radiation therapy and a mastectomy,” she explains. Now, already recovered, proudly explains how that experience has motivated her to continue researching this disease. “Thanks to science, there is hope“explains Rovira, one of the researchers selected in the latest grant award from the CRIS Foundation.
From the laboratories of the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBEL) and the Barcelona UniversityRovira will start a new pancreatic cancer research program. “It is one of the most lethal, with a survival rate of less than 10%,” he explains. On the one hand, according to this scientist, because not many early markers of this disease are known and this ends up greatly delaying the diagnosis. And on the other hand, because it is a tumor that progresses very quicklywhich is usually detected when it is already in a state of metastasis and, in addition, usually responds poorly to current treatments.
Rovira, together with his team, will begin a research project to study the origin of this very lethal disease.
Rovira, together with his team, is now preparing to study this disease from its origin to better understand how it originates, how to detect it and, above all, how to treat it more effectively. For years, this researcher has accumulated molecular information from more than 22,000 individual cells of the pancreas. Now, she will investigate which of them are related to the onset of this disease. “We want find out the origin of this tumor from the first cell,” says this scientist. “We also want to investigate what it is like and what happens around the first tumor cells, because there are more and more studies that indicate that this could be key to the development of the disease,” she adds.
Early diagnosis
One of the first steps of this research will be to create different laboratory models to “simulate different types of pancreatic cancer”, originating from different types of cells, to study which are more or less aggressive. This process will also serve both to better understand their origin and evolution and to find some clues that will allow these tumors to be detected in their initial stages. “We want to find biomarkers that allow us to detect pancreatic cancers early from, for example, blood samples,” explains Rovira.
This scientist’s laboratory will create different models to simulate the origin and development of different pancreatic tumors
The Rovira team, which thanks to this scholarship will increase from six to nine members, aims to lay the foundations to understand the origins of this disease. And all this, in turn, could be key to the search for techniques to treat this very complex cancer. At the moment, according to the scientist, the great hope is in treatments related to inhibitors of the ‘cursed protein’ KRAS, one of the ‘pieces’ that is mutated in most cancers and which, according to some studies, It could be related to the aggressiveness of certain tumors. “The therapies tested to date have worked regularly, so we need to focus on innovative treatments that they manage to go further,” he comments.
Rovira speaks with enthusiasm about the future of oncology research. “I want to believe that thanks to the work of doctors and scientists, the word cancer will no longer be a sentence“, she comments hopefully. “There is hope. And there is because right now we have the best minds in the world, the most prestigious centers on the planet and the best scientists in Spain working to find a cure for this disease. That, for me, is the great hope against cancer“argues this scientist.
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