At the IGTP TODAY
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.
On Friday a very special crowd-funding project got underway to support cancer research at Can Ruti. Sales of the book, which describes the experiences of a colon cancer patient in his own words, will be donated to research into the illness carried out by the IGTP Group led by Eva Martínez-Balibrea.
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.
Institutions on the campus held a celebratory workshop; hearing scientific presentations, outlining of work to be done and the signing of a declaration of intentions by the directors. The event closed with a participatory round table session.
With more than 25 speakers the workshop has been a meeting point for professionals discussing the latest advances in the field of molecular diagnostics of urological tumours, immunotherapy and the emerging lines of research in this branch of oncology.
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.
To coincide with the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on 11 February, the IGTP will hold its first workshop dedicated to the reality for women on the campus. The event is organized by the Working Group Women in Science made up of representatives of diverse institutions on the Can Ruti Campus. During the morning the directors of different centres on the campus will sign a declaration of intentions based on the recommendations of the United Nations to promote equal opportunities and the scientific career path for women.
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.
