“Clinical trials aren’t only a tool for research but also represent a real possibility of treatment for patients who’ve exhausted many other options”. This is the premise with which Elena Garralda, Director of UITM-CaixaResearch at VHIO, validates each of the new therapies promoted by this research unit.

One example of this is the clinical trial for the European project PragmaTIL, led by VHIO. With the participation of 12 institutions from 6 countries, including “la Caixa” Foundation, this trial has treated the first patient with an innovative immunotherapy. Its aim? To improve the care of people with resistant tumours, reducing the treatment’s toxicity but without it losing any efficacy.

The immune system is one of the great achievements of evolution. It detects and responds to viruses, bacteria, parasites, tumour cells and even attacks by inert objects. Similarly, our efforts to understand and decipher how our own immune system works is also one of humanity’s great achievements. A clear example of this is the fact that, in the last 50 years alone, vaccines have saved 154 million lives according to the World Health Organisation.

Today immunology, the branch of biomedical science that studies the immune system, is going much further. It’s redefining biomedicine, paving the way for new advances in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of all kinds of diseases, from cancer to neurological disorders.

Tuberculosis is one of humanity’s oldest infectious diseases and the one that has caused the most deaths throughout history. In the last 200 years alone, it has claimed the lives of more than a billion people and is still the most lethal infectious disease today.

To address this major global health challenge, more and more progress is being made in prevention, diagnosis and treatment. The only vaccine available for the disease was developed in 1921 but there are currently 14 new vaccine candidates under clinical development, getting closer to being tested on humans.

There are social, economic and scientific challenges to eradicating tuberculosis but also promising advances that offer hope for the future.

Alzheimer’s is the most common cause of dementia and, despite its huge impact, there’s still no effective cure. Its impact on society is huge and it has been calculated that, by 2050, the number of cases of Alzheimer’s will have tripled, rising from the current 1.2 cases in Spain to 3.6 million. As the disease advances, there’s progressive neurodegeneration that affects not only memory but also the ability to relate to others and even the individual’s own identity.

For years, it was believed that the brain damage associated with Alzheimer’s, especially in the regions essential for memory, only occurred when two proteins were present: amyloid beta and tau. However, this hypothesis could be about to change.

Thousands of years ago, finding food was no easy task and our bodies became increasingly specialised in storing a precious energy resource: fat. 

However, now the situation is quite different. In today’s society, with our typically sedentary lives and high-calorie diets, we accumulate fat very quickly and its excess in our bodies is directly related to obesity and other metabolic health problems.

When we ingest excess calories, cells called adipocytes are responsible for storing them as fat. This prevents fat from being deposited in other tissues and organs such as the liver or the walls of blood vessels, which would be harmful. Until now, it was not fully understood how adipocytes managed to store this fat without becoming overwhelmed but,