Researchers at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute have developed a method to analyze long-range interactions in the DNA -the interactome- from a very low amount of starting material. The method, named liCHi-C, opens the door to study the interactome of patient-derived samples instead of in vitro models for the first time and help us understand how alterations in regulatory regions affect the inner working of cancer cells.

The Royal National Academy of Pharmacy has awarded Dr. Sanchez-Cespedes, Principal Investigator of the Cancer Genetics group at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, for her work "Precision medicine in immunotherapy and lung cancer".

Researchers of the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre in Madrid and the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute have developed a cell therapy for a type of leukemia which currently has very few treatment options. The innovative STAb therapy has been developed thanks to funding from the Spanish Association Against Cancer (AECC).

A study led Dr. Anna Bigas, Principal Investigator of the Stem Cell and Cancer Research Group at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute and the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute, has revealed the key role a protein plays in identifying patients with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia who will not respond to standard treatment

Sergi Cuartero, Elisabetta Mereu, Gregoire Stik, Oriol de Barrios and Lucas Pontel have been awarded with the prestigious Ramón y Cajal grants within the 2021 call from the spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, through the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI).

OneChain Immunotherapeutics (OCI), spin-off founded by Dr. Pablo Menéndez and the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, has obtained authorization for the CARxALL clinical trial to evaluate a new CAR-T therapy for patients who have T-cell leukemia without therapeutic alternatives. 

Dr. Manel Esteller and Dr. Verónica Dávalos, researchers at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, describe in a new article the impact of epigenetics on cancer treatment and how it has become a crucial tool to improve early detection, predict disease progression and become a target for new treatments.

Manel Esteller, Josep Maria Ribera, Esteban Ballestar, Alejandro Vaquero, Montse Sánchez-Cespedes, María Berdasco, Fumiichiro Yamamoto and Ciril Rozman, together with other nearly twenty researchers and medical staff from Can Ruti Campus institutions, are included in Elsevier's Scopus list, composed by the 200,000 most renowned researchers worldwide.

An international team of researchers on Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS) has found that gender is an important factor in the progression of the disease with men showing a poorer prognosis mainly due to cardiovascular interactions of anemia with mild MDS and a worse and broader mutational landscape than women. The team proposes to incorporate sex and its associated distinctive features into the informed prognostic scoring system (IPSS), to better stratify MDS patients and improve personalized decision making in the clinic.

Monocytes from severe covid-19 patients show an altered epigenetic status, according to results by the Epigenetic and Immune Disease group of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute. The alterations found in these cells, key in promoting inflammation, can explain features of the aberrant immune response against Sars-Cov-2 infection, such as impaired communication with other immune cells and maturation defects. This comprehensive analysis of monocyte’s epigenetics under severe covid-19, the first of its kind, stresses the importance of these cells in modulating the immune response.