Celebrated last week and presided by Sol Daurella who recently took up the reins as FERO Foundation’s President, FERO’s community gathered once again at the stunning Oval Room of Catalonia’s National Museum of Art (MNAC) for its annual fundraising gala dinner, sponsored by Andbank, and the 10th edition of FERO’s Annual Awards for Translational Research to promote cancer science of excellence and grow the careers of up-and-coming talents in oncology. This year, FERO honored three more VHIO investigators who now join VHIO’s previous seven Annual Award recipients.
Charied by Andrés Cervantes, Director of Oncology at the Institute of Health Research INCLIVA (Valencia, Spain), the Foundation’s expert selection committee backed two pioneering VHIO projects aimed at developing the liquid biopsy of cancer. This year’s three prizes, totaling at 80,000 EUR each, were presented to Joaquin Mateo, Violeta Serra and Judith Balmaña, Principal Investigators of VHIO’s Prostate Cancer Translational Research, Experimental Therapeutics, and Hereditary Cancer Genetics Groups, respectively, and Asís Palazón, Investigator at CIC bioGUNE in Balbao.
Concerning VHIO’s duo of FERO Awards, one was jointly supported by the Ramón Areces Foundation, and the other by the hair care and styling company, ghd.
Since VHIO incorporated in-house BEAMing liquid biopsy RAS biomarker technology back in 2015, the first academic test center to do so, we continue to make significant progress in validating and developing liquid biopsy and Droplet Digital PCR Bio-Rad technologies to better guide treatment decisions for our patients and less invasively ‘police’ disease over time, in real time. VHIO’s contributions to-date have largely been possible thanks to the continued backing and belief received from FERO. These two most recent accolades will enable our scientists to further develop this approach towards ultimately delivering a more precise and rapid diagnosis of cancer, steering treatment decision making, and monitoring the course of cancer and response to therapy.
Presented by Andrés Cervantes and Paloma Garcia Peña, the Ramón Areces Foundation, Joaquin was awarded for his project that is set to test whether this novel approach can also help to predict the evolution of prostate cancer and in so doing, potentially detect disease relapse earlier as well as more ‘smartly’ monitor cancer’s next moves.
To be spearhead by VHIO’s Violeta Serra and Judith Balmaña, the very first joint FERO-ghd project – a new initiative launched this year – will also develop liquid biopsy to monitor response to therapy and establish sensitivity of breast cancer patients with BRCA1/2 mutations to treatment with PARP inhibitors. The goal is to more effectively tailor personalized treatment regimens to the unique specificities of each particular cancer, more effectively tackle cancer drug resistance, as well as establish which patients would be most likely to benefit from these targeted therapies. This Award was presented by José Baselga, FERO’s Honorary President, and Thys Niermeyer, Director General of ghd in Spain.
Projecting a live fundraising counter on the big screens, Piru Cantarell, Director of FERO and master of ceremonies, then invited donations for a project aimed at more precisely monitoring the course of medulloblastoma – the most frequent of all pediatric brain tumors and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths in children.
More specifically, project lead Joan Seoane, Co-Program Director of Preclinical and Translational Research at VHIO, was invited to take center stage and provide a synopsis about this critical line of research. Building on his previous studies showing proof-of-concept that cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) can be exploited to characterize brain tumours as it contains ctDNA, Joan will seek to advance and apply this approach in order to better gauge the aggression of disease in these young patients, more faithfully guide treatment decisions, and use liquid biopsy-driven insights to develop and accelerate more precise and potent therapies against brain cancer. It is thanks to the generosity of FERO’s devoted community and dedicated supporters that by the close of the dinner the amount raised for this particular project totaled at over 43,000 EUR.
We take this opportunity to gratefully thank FERO for its continued and invaluable support – from the very outset – that enables science of excellence and the career growth of our up-and-coming talents in oncology.
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