One of the first lessons learned when researching is that the more patients studied, the more consistent the results will be. Furthermore, in a world where media and channels are increasingly immediate, distance is no longer an impediment to working with different hospitals on clinical trials that lead to new advances. With the aim of fostering this cooperation, the Mutua Madrileña Foundation includes a new category in its annual call for Health Research Grants to incentivize it. It has been doing so since 2019, selecting projects carried out by research teams from at least four different autonomous communities.
The advantages of promoting this type of research include sharing databases and patients, synergies in specialists and technology, as well as obtaining more consistent results. They are not without difficulties, such as the need to create fluid long-distance communication channels and homogeneous protocols. These are some of the challenges faced by the 60 teams of doctors selected by the Mutua Madrileña Foundation in the three calls that contemplate this mode of collaboration, located in 23 health research centers in 11 autonomous communities.
The intestinal flora and its relationship with colon cancer
One of these collaborative studies is led by the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), with Dr. Paolo Nuciforo at the helm. With researchers from six other centers in Catalonia, Andalusia, Galicia, Cantabria, Valencia, and Madrid, they are working to find a possible origin for colon cancer. Specifically, the researchers are studying the bacterium Fusobacterium and its relationship with the development and progression of localized colorectal cancer to determine if it is an oncomicrobe.
According to their working hypothesis, the intestinal flora, the population of bacteria that live in our intestine, could be related to the appearance and development of some types of colon tumor. Confirming this hypothesis would represent a milestone in the treatment of colorectal cancer. If so, many markers of the disease would become available in these microbes that live inside us, and some would even become targets to attack with new drugs.
Confirming Dr. Paolo Nuciforo's hypothesis would represent a milestone in the treatment of colorectal cancerThanks to the selection of the Mutua Madrileña Foundation in the 2020 call,the study will determine, at a national level, what is the real prevalence of Fusobacterium and if there is a difference between geographical areas of Spain. These conclusions will allow analyzing whether geographical differences, if they exist, are correlated with lifestyle or diet and whether prevalence is related to the biology or evolution of each patient's tumor. In this case, the more than 800 tumor samples, from all over Spain, will be analyzed at Vall d'Hebron Hospital.
"There are different studies that suggest that colorectal cancer infected by Fusobacterium may be a specific subtype of colon cancer that may require a different therapeutic and also diagnostic approach," explains Dr. Nuciforo, who is immersed in the process of demonstrating it.
Other funded studies: rare diseases, transplants, and traumatology
Dr. Nuciforo's study is one of ten multicenter investigations that have been launched thanks to the Mutua Madrileña Foundation in the last three years, with a total budget of 900,000 euros. The collaborative studies currently funded by the Mutua Madrileña Foundation also investigate issues such as the treatment of rare diseases, traumatology, and transplants, in addition to oncology.
Other studies funded by Mutua Madrileña with Catalan participation include the one that seeks technology capable of predicting the success of a kidney transplant, led by Dr. Gloria Álvarez-Llamas at the Fundación Jiménez Díaz in Madrid and in which groups from the Vall d'Hebron, Puerta de Hierro in Madrid, Marqués de Valdecilla in Santander, and Cruces in Bilbao hospitals also participate. The study has allowed establishing this inter-community collaboration network to search for large-scale markers that predict long-term kidney function after a transplant.
Or the study that, since this year, is led by Dr. Javier Torres, from the Institut de Recerca Hospital Universitari Vall d'Hebron-IR-HUVH, which develops a gene therapy strategy to correct a mutation that causes an ultra-rare disease affecting about thirty children worldwide. He will do so together with teams from the 12 de Octubre hospital in Madrid, the Health Research Institute (IIS) of Aragon, and the IIS of Navarra. If the strategy is validated, it could be implemented in other diseases.
Rare diseases are the focus of another study with the participation of centers in Catalonia, Valencia, and Madrid, which collaborate with Dr. Anxo Fernández, from the Santiago de Compostela Health Research Institute, in the development of a contact lens that releases a medication to treat babies and children with a rare ophthalmological disease, ocular cystinosis, which is characterized by the accumulation of cystine within the lysosomes of cells in certain tissues such as the kidney, muscle, and cornea.
These grants have also served to launch two more projects with Catalan participation. One of them aims to understand the reality of Spanish intensive care medicine services in patients admitted for any type of trauma to draw conclusions and create a blood transfusion protocol that allows organizing blood consumption without losing effectiveness, while the other is currently developing and validating a real-time PCR diagnostic method to systematically implement it in organ donor screening.