Ibane Abasolo, researcher at the Institute for Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (IQAC-CSIC), has received one of the 44 Research Grants 2023 awarded by the Association Against Cancer in Barcelona for the ReachGlio project. Abasolo leads this project – which will have a grant of €70,500 – and which seeks to improve brain cancer treatments through the use of nanotechnologies that facilitate the delivery of drugs to the tumour. Miriam Royo, a researcher from the Multivalent System for Nanomedicine group, also participates in the project, among other research personnel.
ReachGlio project
Glioblastomas are one of the most aggressive tumours ever exist, mainly due to their location within the brain and their ability to invade the tissue around them. Furthermore, they are very heterogeneous tumours. All of this partly explains why there are still no curative therapy options for patients with this type of tumour and why the prognosis remains very poor.
One of the main problems with drugs designed to stop the growth of glioblastomas is how difficult it is for them to effectively reach the brain and to be distributed homogeneously in this tumour with such different areas.
“To overcome this obstacle, our project proposes using small modifications (nanoparticles) in existing drugs, which have already been shown to be capable of stopping tumour cells but which have difficult access to the brain. We hope that these improved drugs, called nanomedicines, allow them to cross the barrier that exists between blood vessels and the brain, as well as target tumour cells” explains Ibane Abasolo.
The project will include European experts in preclinical models of glioblastoma, production and modification of nanoparticles, and physical methods for the identification of modified drugs. Using this complementary knowledge, they hope to propose effective and less toxic clinical trials for patients with glioblastoma in the short-medium term.
CIBER-BBN Communication