Speakers of the III Simposia-Traslational Research: Eva Barragán, Antonio Pineda, Gloria Ribas and Jacobo Martínez (from left to right)

Last March 24th, the city of Alcoy (Alicante) promoted the II Meeting of Researchers in Cancer city of Alcoy under the title “Research at the service of the cancer patient.”

Organized by the Valencian Biobanco Network, managed by FISABIO and with the collaboration of the Alcoy City Council and the + QUEUNTRAIL Association, it hosted scientists with lines of research in cancer and faculty of any biomedical branch, as well as technicians and students interested in this topic.

Different professionals from the research centers of Valencian Community, such as Miguel Hernández-CSIC Institute of Neuroscience, INCLIVA, Príncipe Felipe Research Center, FISABIO or La Fe Health Research Institute participated in the symposium, showing the methodological advances and the new techniques that are used in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

The novelty of this edition was the masterful lecture of Héctor Peinado from the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO), which was focused on a vanguard topic in cancer as it is to understand the process of metastasis, making a review that poses a paradigm shift in the way we understand metastases. Before the arrival of tumoral cells, tumors prepare the environment in the organ that later they are going to colonize by soluble factors. These areas with optimal conditions for the formation of metastases are called premetastasis niches and attacking them may contribute to improving the survival of patients with cancer.

Dr. Gloria Ribas, as head of INDEST’s cancer functional genomics research line, participated in the translational research symposium giving one of the lectures entitled: Identification of differential biomarkers in breast cancer in young women.

In this talk, she showed the results obtained to date of the differences between the tumor tissue of young women (<35 years) compared to women with breast cancer, the most important being the different gene expression of microRNAs and several alterations in the methylation pattern. This has made it possible to identify molecular markers belonging to various signalling pathways such as neuronal, NOTCH activation, DNA repair and vesicular traffic. Those biomarkers are now being validated in the laboratory.

By the end of the day, the objectives of the meeting were fulfilled: to make public the work being carried out by the researchers of the Valencian Community in the advance of knowledge and in the fight against cancer in all its aspects. In this same forum, researchers from different disciplines with competitive research projects reached a meeting point between them where synergies between different groups and disciplines were promoted.