- The FERO Foundation awards one of this year's FERO Scholarships to the CNB researcher Esteban Veiga.
- His project focuses on the research of new immunotherapies against breast cancer.
The FERO Foundation announced the winners of the XIX FERO Scholarships and the winner of the II FERO-Mango Research Project in Breast Cancer in a virtual meeting that took place on October 19. These grants are intended to help young researchers develop a translational research project in cancer for a two years period..
Esteban Veiga Chacón, researcher at the National Center for Biotechnology, Spanish National Reserarch Council (CNB-CSIC), has obtained the Fero Grant thanks to his research "Next generation of cancer immunotherapies based in bacteria-trained lymphocytes". This project focuses on consolidating the data obtained on the efficacy of bacT cells used as novel immunotherapy to fight tumors, with a specific focus on breast cancer.
“In order to consolidate the proofs of concept carried out where we demonstrated the usefulness of bacteria-trained lymphocytes (bacT) as a new antitumor therapy, we will use various mouse mammary tumors. If we can also reactivate the CAR-T cells, it would be a great step towards new therapies for solid tumors, a field where this technique has not produced good results so far. Furthermore, the project aims to generate new algorithms for the identification of tumor neoantigens, one of the greatest challenges of tumor immunotherapy ”, explains Dr. Esteban Veiga Chacón.
Winners of the FERO Scholarships 2020 In addition to Esteban Veiga, Dr Laura Belver, from the Institut Josep Carreras, has been awarded for her project "Molecular pathways and targeted therapies in Juvenile Myelomonocytic Leukemia" and Dr Antoni Celià-Terrassa, from the Institut Hospital del Mar d'Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM ) has been awarded the II FERO-Mango Research Project in Breast Cancer, for this project “Double-edge therapy targeting metastasis-initiating cells and immune cells” project, specialized in the study of metastasis initiating cells (MICs). The FERO Foundation is a private foundation dedicated to promoting cancer research. The entity is committed to translational research, a model based on transmitting the results of basic research to the clinic, allowing patients to benefit more quickly from scientific advances against cancer.