Royal National Academy of Medicine Awards 2022
September 6, 2022Research Grants Francisco Soria Melguizo Foundation 2022
September 7, 2022A team from the Aragón Health Research Institute, led by doctors Julian Pardo and Ariel Ramírez and with the participation of the predoctoral researcher Cecilia Pesini, has revealed that natural killer (NK) cells, mainly responsible for the destruction of cancer cells, contain inside a protein (called PD-1) that makes tumors invisible. This discovery will help improve treatment based on NK cell immunotherapy against adult and childhood tumors and make tumor destruction more effective.
The magazine Oncoimmunology, one of the most prestigious in cancer immunotherapy, has echoed this finding, confirming the importance of this result.
This project, funded by Aspanoa y Spanish Association Against Cancer in Aragon, is part of one of the lines of research of the first childhood cancer project in Aragon and is focused on studying why NK cells have stopped working in children with leukemias and neuroblastomas to subsequently test in the laboratory if introducing NK cells properly altered, a more successful treatment against these childhood cancers could be designed, also in combination with other current therapies.