2022 Call for Innovation Projects in Personalized Medicine and Advanced Therapies. ISCIII – CDTI
October 10, 2022Call for 2022 Grants to Encourage Research Consolidation.
October 19, 2022The project, tested in pigs, hopes to reach humans in two years / It is focused on patients with metastasis.
Antonio Güemes is a surgeon at the Clinical Hospital, principal investigator of the Surgical, Clinical and Experimental Research Group of the Aragon Health Research Institute (IIS Aragón), and the head of the team that is carrying out a project focused "on very rare cancer patients." serious, the worst, when it already extends to the armpit and metastasis appears," he says. In his study, which will end this year, it is intended that once women receive chemotherapy and the tumor must be removed, it should not be done with all the nodes but only with the affected ones.
For this "we have to mark the nodes before chemotherapy" and that's where his study comes in, in which "dye, which can be Indian ink or melanin, is injected with nanoparticles and they cause the lymph node to be dyed and stay there for months." ». This causes "the markers to agglutinate, the lymph node is removed and we avoid lymphedema, which is very disabling." At the moment the project has been carried out in pigs and "we have verified that the dyes do not migrate and stay there" but it remains "to see how this affects the ganglion." At the moment the tests are being completed and during the next year "analysis and results" will be done and, as they are natural products and not medications, "in one or two years, they will be able to be tested on women," he says. The benefit will be "to easily locate the lymph node affected by the tumor and only extract it" and furthermore, "it can be done in all hospitals because now it can only be done with nuclear medicine and it is only available in the two large hospitals."
What has been seen in pigs is "the drug injection technique is reliable and safe and remains in the lymph node for months without altering it."


Guemes points out that cancer is an "evolution inherent to higher beings and we will never be able to forget about it, but we will be able to avoid dying from cancer and having it leave consequences." To do this, he also asks to launch "big data clinical trials" to have data and information and use them to "draw conclusions and help us make decisions"; because they will be able to see that "neighborhood or company has a worse prognosis or characteristics in younger or pregnant patients," Güemes concludes.
Source El Periódico de Aragón; Eva Garcia