A team from IIS Aragón will study solid tumors in children using Aspanoa.

A new group from the Aragonese Health Research Institute. (IIS Aragon), Cancer heterogeneity and immunonomics, just started a project to find weaknesses in the most common solid tumors in childhood cancer patients. thanks to a grant of 60,000 euros from Aspanoa, the Aragonese Association against Childhood Cancer.

Scientist of Teruel Rebeca Sanz, native of Urrea de Gay.n, the one who leads this group of researchers which are going to study neoantigens that generate tumors, which are fragments of proteins that have mutated in cancer cells, the institute reports.

“We want to take advantage of neoantigens as a strategy to develop cancer treatments., since our own body recognizes them. There are many groups around the world already trying to do this with solid tumors in adults, and we are going to try this in pediatric cancers,” says Dr. Sanz.

From this new group IIS Aragon We’re going to study what type of neoantigens this childhood cancer generates. and if the immune system detects them and eliminates them.

For this, collected publicly available information on more than 1000 neuroblastomas., one of the most common pediatric tumors. The goal of bioinformatics is to study recurrent mutations and their correlation with survival, sex, or age.

“Neoantigens are usually unique to each patient, in which case personalized vaccines will have to be developed for each child., which will be very expensive. But if we found a repeat, it would be an important discovery. We will test this directly on tumor samples and this will open the door to therapy in the future,” explains Rebeca Sanz.

This project has a second goal: expand knowledge about solid tumors in pediatrics using a novel technique called spatial transcriptomics.

“Here, we will be able to characterize childhood tumors in great detail“Points out Sanz, who adds that they will be able to study 20,000 genes at different points in the tumor.”This will allow us to obtain very detailed information about the microenvironment of these tumors.which will certainly lead to the emergence of new hypotheses and areas of work,” he notes.

In particular, they are going to study neuroblastoma in depth due to its higher incidence and the fact that it accounts for 15% of current childhood cancer deaths; but also others, such as Wilms tumor, kidney cancer or childhood sarcomas. The samples will be provided by the Miguel Servet Children’s Hospital in Zaragoza. Two doctors from the Department of Oncopediatrics are participating in the project: Yurena Aguilar and Alba Fernandez.

Also The TMELab of the Aragonese Engineering Research Institute is involved in this research. (I3A) and other groups of IIS Aragon.

“Aspanoa’s help means a lot to us. We had bioinformatics methods ready, but we needed that push to start analyzing patient samples from our hospital. This area is now very strengthened because it will also allow us to hire a postdoctoral researcher.“adds the IIS Aragon researcher.