On 21 and 22 March, the inaugural meeting of the European THERAVLINFO project was held in IDIBAPS’ Esteve auditorium. Coordinated by IDIBAPS-Hospital Clínic Barcelona, the study is funded by €993,303.67 from the Interreg VI-A Spain-France-Andorra (POCTEFA 2021-2027) programme and is aimed at advancing towards personalised medicine in patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a cancer of the lymphatic tissue found in the lymph nodes, spleen and other organs of the immune system. Specifically, the B-cell lymphoma that is the subject of this study consists of an abnormal growth of B-lymphocytes in these tissues and organs.
THERAVLINFO is the continuation of the European project IMLINFO. The IMLINFO project created a multidisciplinary collaborative network among five partners to determine the efficacy of new immunotherapy treatments. In particular, it focused on non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma patients who did not respond to standard treatment, who had early relapses or whose disease transformed into aggressive lymphoma.
This first part of the project established a repository of samples from patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A three-dimensional cell culture platform was also developed that recapitulated the disease in vitro and made it possible to identify potential therapeutic targets specific to each tumour.
This path towards personalised medicine has now led to the start of the second part, the THERAVLINFO project, which in the next three years aims to achieve the following objectives:
- Improve cultivation systems in three dimensions.
- Develop drugs against the targets identified in the first part of the project. Each type of tumour expresses different immune checkpoint proteins, which can regulate the immune system’s activity and reduce the treatment’s effectiveness. Knowing which of these is expressed by each tumour can help us to choose the best therapy in each case.
- Validating the therapeutic potential of drugs in mouse models.
For the second part of the project, the multidisciplinary network has brought on a new institution from Navarre with experience in preclinical models of lymphoma in mice. In total, the following institutions are participating in the THERAVLINFO project:
- Fundació de Recerca Clínic Barcelona-Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (Spain) IP: Patricia Pérez-Galán
- Hospital Clínic de Barcelona (Spain) IP: Dolors Colomer
- Université Toulouse III (France) IP: Christine Bezombes
- Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Toulouse (France) IP: Camille Laurent
- University of Navarre (Spain) IP: Sergio Roa
Furthermore, within this network, there are 2 CIBERONC groups involved: one linked to the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona (project CB16/12/00334 IP: Dolors Colomer) and the other linked to the University of Navarra (project CB16/12/00489 IP: Felipe Prósper).
The project includes the cooperation of experts in multicellular three-dimensional cultures, animal models, multiparametric cytometry, confocal microscopy, omics technologies and computational analysis and seeks to foster the training of young researchers who can integrate and rotate between cross-border partners.
