Lab work gives us the solutions to problems of everyday clinical relevance to patients
Miguel Angel Quintela
The Clinical Research Program at the CNIO has made expeditious haste one of its priorities. The aim is to ensure that patients benefit without undue delay from the results of research carried out at the pre-clinical stage, which the program also supervises. To that end, the CNIO takes part in conducting clinical trials (nine of them, currently) and partners with over 60 hospitals as well as the large pharmaceutical concerns.
To be precise about it, we participate in the development of new cancer drugs and study the mechanisms that determine how tumors respond to or resist those drugs. At the same time, we are looking for biomarkers that allow us to define a more personalized prognosis and course of treatment.
CNIO’s Breast Cancer Clinical Research Unit, headed by Miguel Ángel Quintela, has already paved the way for two new series of independent clinical trials. The Prostate Cancer Clinical Research Unit, under David Olmos, searches for the markers indicating activity or resistance to the principal agents used in countering prostate cancer. At the same time they are investigating the genetic profiles associated with the occurrence of hereditary prostate cancer in the European population.
In addition to supervising a number of international clinical trials, Luis Paz Ares is in charge of the CNIO’s Lung Cancer Clinical Research Unit, which is tasked with identifying the markers that would allow patients with advanced lung cancer to benefit from more custom-tailored therapies.
Among the results achieved by the team under the direction of Joaquín Martínez-López, the Hematological Cancer Clinical Research Unit has developed new tools for the diagnosis and monitoring of several types of tumor.