Many diseases remain an enigma and elude conventional therapies. Can scientists challenge what exists? Today, when there is so much talk about directing health professionals towards personalized medicine, is science prepared to achieve it? In the future, what will be the role of patients? How to overcome the barriers that researchers still have? These were just some of the issues that were addressed in the second edition of the CaixaResearch Health Meeting, held on September 21 and 22 in the Cap Roig Gardens.
The event, organized by the ”la Caixa” Foundation, brought together around forty leading researchers from Spain and Portugal in their fields. Participants shared their specialized knowledge and generated debate on various issues that affect the present and future of health research and innovation. In these sessions, the researchers explained their personal experience as scientists and also, in some cases, as entrepreneurs of organizations linked to their studies.
Some of the best researchers presented their advances in areas that translate into pathologies with a high incidence in the population such as cardiovascular and related metabolic diseases, infectious, oncological and neurological diseases. All of them received aid of between half a million and one million euros from the 2019 CaixaResearch call for Health Research to develop projects that are now ending. The objective is that the work carried out by the scientific teams can be transferred to the field and improve people's lives by opening the door to new therapeutic approaches.
Some of the most relevant names who met at the CaixaResearch Health Meeting were Luis Serrano, director of the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG), María A. Blasco, director of the National Center for Cancer Research (CNIO) and Bruno Silva-Santos, vice director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine (iMM) of Lisbon. All of them, with a long history as group leaders and directors of research centers, analyzed the role of scientists and research centers in promoting innovation. In addition to his work transferring knowledge to the market, Serrano is founder of Pulmobiotics and Orikine Bio, and Bruno Silva-Santos created the spin off Lymphact, which was acquired by Gamma Delta Therapeutics, today part of Takeda. For her part, María A. Blasco received aid in 2018 from the CaixaImpulse program to support innovation from the ”la Caixa” Foundation to develop an anti-cancer drug that would allow progress in an effective therapy against glioblastoma and lung cancer, and She is the founder of the spin offs Life Length and Telomere Therapeutics.
One of the round tables addressed the importance of a change of perspective as a first step to find other solutions to certain therapeutic needs. Carmen M. Fernández Martos, from the CEU San Pablo University, presented her experience when investigating the potential of the hormone that regulates appetite to treat patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease with a life expectancy of between two and five years after diagnosis. Another example was that of Pau Gorostiza, from the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia, who studies how to restore vision with smart drugs activated by light, something that has already been achieved in fish.
Another session addressed how to achieve more impact from health research by involving citizens with the examples of Blanca Fuentes Gimeno, from the University Hospital of La Paz, who analyzed the use of dubbing of television series and movies to facilitate the language recovery in stroke patients, and Frederic Bartumeus, from the Center for Advanced Studies of Blanes, CEAB-CSIC, who spoke about his project to prevent outbreaks of dengue, chikungunya and Zika in Spain thanks to an innovative system of real-time data collection.
For more than 30 years, the ”la Caixa” Foundation has promoted projects in the field of research and innovation in biomedicine and health that are carried out in research centers, universities and hospitals in Spain and Portugal, and currently It collaborates with more than a hundred institutions to generate new scientific knowledge in the field of health. In 2022, the entity chaired by Isidro Fainé allocated 35.6 million euros to different research and innovation projects in biomedicine and health developed in research centers, universities and hospitals in both countries.
Much of the support that the ”la Caixa” Foundation provides to research and innovation is given through competitive calls such as CaixaResearch Health Research and CaixaImpulse Health Innovation. This year's Cap Roig meeting also included a talk on the way in which candidate projects to receive one of these grants are evaluated. In the end, attendees, after two intense days of reflection, demonstrated the transformative power of medicine.
