At the IGTP TODAY
This year the Innovation in Vesicles and Cells for Application in Therapy (IVECAT) has published a protocol for Size-Exclusion Chromatography for separating extracellular vesicles from different biological fluids and a review of the current techniques available.
Can Ruti has been awarded a research project by the Spanish Federation for Rare Diseases (FEDER) Foundation in their fourth call for research projects. The winning project, led by Dr Ignacio Blanco and Dr Elisabeth Castellanos, from the Germans Trias I Pujol Hospital and Institute respectively, is one of five financed by the foundation this year. The research will focus personalized attention for Neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) patients to optimize evaluation of their quality of life and refine their classification during diagnosis.
Elisa Martró, leader of the Clinical Virology and New Diagnostic Approaches Research Group at the Microbiology Service of the Germans Trias i Pujol Hospital, has been awarded with one of the five projects granted in the First Edition of the Gilead projects for Micro-elimination of Hepatitis C in Spain and evaluated by the Spanish Liver Research Association (AEEH).
In an in vitro study researchers have shown how the nanoparticles are more effective than antibiotics alone. In the future, the nanoparticles will be administered orally as a non-invasive treatment that is much more acceptable to patients.
The IGTP and the Germans Trias Hospital face the spotlight for rare diseases again. This year our professionals are joining World Rare Disease Day on the last day of February to highlight these diseases and shine a light on the research activities in the field on campus.
The Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology Research Group, led by Teresa Gasull at the IGTP has a mission to carry out basic and translational research into strokes. This week they have published a review of recent advances in the field, which includes the role of the ferroptosis in stroke-induced neurodegeneration and includes references to their own recent publications in the field.
A study by the Digestive Inflammatory Pathology Research Group at the IGTP was awarded the best basic-translational research study in the Catalan Digestive Medicine Conference 2019. The study presented by Dr Violeta Lorén is within one of the main research lines of the group and centres on understanding, predicting and solving one of the main complications arising from therapy for patients with ulcerative colitis: the failure of glucocorticoid treatment.
The study, by the Hereditary Cancer research group at the IGTP, focuses on characterizing induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from benign tumors, characteristic of Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1). The iPSCs are able to regenerate indefinitely and give rise to any other cell in the body so they represent an inexhaustible supply of cells to study tumors and new treatments.
How do they do it? How do they get genetic information from a blood sample? How do you manage the genetic information of 20,000 people? How do you get to understand all this information so it can be used for research? These are some of the questions asked by GCAT participants while visiting the National Centre for Genomics Analysis- Centre for Genomic Regulation (CNAG-CRG) and Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), both centres are collaborating with the project. These questions now have answers.
A new study by the Immunology of Diabetes Group, led by Marta Vives-Pi at the IGTP in conjunction with the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, builds on previous work led by the group in Hamburg. The new study looks into the effect of betamethasone on new-borns and its susceptibility to develop type 1 diabetes, when it is administered to mothers before birth. As well as corroborating the previous results and finding new changes in the developing immune system, the results also throw light onto the effect of the drug on the insulin-producing cells themselves.
