Aragón will have a research unit in advanced cell therapies to treat different types of cancer

The Spanish Association Against Cancer in Aragon, thanks to a posthumous donation of 1,9 million, will contribute to the creation of the necessary research infrastructure

The teams of researchers Julián Pardo and Diego Sánchez and hematologist Luis Palomera lead the project based on the application of CAR-T and CAR-NK cells

At the end of the year, Aragon will have a Research Unit in Advanced Cellular Therapies, a multidisciplinary space made up of research, medical and specific technical personnel aimed at the application of new immunotherapy treatments against cancer using CAR-T and CAR-NK cells. These therapies consist of modifying the patient's own immune system cells through genetic engineering so that they act selectively against the tumor cell and, therefore, eliminate the disease. 

The creation and implementation of this infrastructure, which will have a clean room where the production of CAR cells can be carried out under suitable conditions for their infusion into patients, will be carried out thanks to the donation of the legacy of a woman from Zaragoza, Clementa Soria, to the Spanish Association Against Cancer to support research in Aragon in this field.

Thanks to this new space, research groups from our and other communities working on these lines of research will be able to transfer their results to patients in the form of clinical trials. To carry out this project, the Spanish Association Against Cancer will contribute an amount of 1,9 million euros, corresponding to the donation from Clementa Soria's legacy.

Thus, the IIS Aragón will have a new space equipped with the appropriate instrumentation for cell production under the technical responsibility of Carmen Oñate (IIS Aragón), with extensive experience in the management of this type of infrastructure. In this way, it will become the first accredited center in the community to produce cellular treatments for advanced therapies against cancer or other pathologies and thus be able to apply them safely, to evaluate their effectiveness in patients. 

Likewise, within the framework of the project, the necessary actions will be carried out to launch a first experimental clinical trial that will be led by researchers Julián Pardo and Diego Sánchez, with extensive experience in research in CAR-T and NK therapies. , from the IIS Aragón, and by Luis Palomera, expert in multiple myeloma, from the IIS Aragón and hematologist at the Lozano Blesa University Clinical Hospital. In this sense, the project will initially focus on the clinical evaluation of a CAR for the treatment of hematological malignancies with a very poor prognosis such as multiple myeloma.

The Minister of Health of the Government of Aragon, Sira Repollés, and the president of the Spanish Association Against Cancer in Zaragoza, José Luis Ansó, have signed today the agreement that will make this great strategic project a reality for the community and that will enable access of Aragonese cancer patients to these therapies. «For Aragón it is a milestone and we show our intense gratitude to Clementa Soria, who has made it possible for us to have the necessary facilities to later be accredited as a reference center. We are in luck. “This is a solid project with a future for Aragon,” said Repollés.

Ansó, for his part, thanked Clementa Soria for “her very big heart” for testifying in favor of the association “with the express desire to invest in oncological research in the Aragonese territory.” “For us it is an honor to make her last wish come true by supporting an innovative project that will provide Aragonese healthcare with the possibility of accessing cutting-edge treatments, with great possibilities thanks to the future applications that CAR-T cells may have. We are fully aware that oncological research will allow us to achieve higher rates of cancer survival in the near future,” he added.

For his part, the scientific director of the IIS Aragón, Ángel Lanas, has presented the project, of which he has highlighted "This agreement will allow us to investigate new immunotherapy treatments against cancer using CAR-T and CAR-NK cells with the aim of "to be able to improve patient treatments."

In Aragon, numerous lines of research related to research in advanced therapies have been and are being developed, including NK (natural killer) cells, CAR-T or CAR-NK, piloted by research teams with more than 20 years of experience in this field. field. This project, in addition to facilitating Aragonese hospitals to obtain the necessary accreditation for the use of CAR-T in healthcare, will focus on the development of lines of research in CAR-T and other similar therapies such as NK that can be transferred from the laboratory to patients through validation in clinical trials. It should be noted that at the IIS Aragón new experimental protocols have already been developed for the use of advanced therapy in cancer, which have already been evaluated and validated in animal models but which have not yet been able to be transferred to patients due to the absence of a adequate infrastructure for clinical use.

Project background

Advanced CART cell therapy was approved in 2017 for the treatment of a type of lymphoma in adults and children in the United States. Since then, it has been implemented in different national and international hospital centers, demonstrating high effectiveness. Its application is expanding to various types of cancer, and it is estimated that in a few years it will increase exponentially to address hematological and solid tumors in patients of all ages and other diseases such as infectious and autoimmune.

Although today there are only two CART drugs approved by the SNS for healthcare use, there are more than 500 experimental clinical trials underway around the world, which reinforces the need to create more accredited centers capable of dealing with the new indications that will be approved soon.

In Spain, several hospitals in numerous communities have been accredited, based on guidelines established by the Ministry of Health, as reference centers where patients would be treated with this type of therapies once approved. This project will make it possible to have the appropriate infrastructure in Aragon and, through clinical trials, acquire the necessary medical experience to be able to accredit a care treatment center in our community in the near future.

Until March 1, 2022, after 40 months of approval of the Plan to address advanced therapies in the SNS, 29 requests have been made from Aragon for this treatment, of which 14 have been favorable, all of them being treated in reference centers outside the Community.