Two UAB cancer research projects receive funding from the AECC

On Monday 24 February the Spanish Association Against Cancer (AECC) presented in Barcelona the 49 AECC 2024 Grants awarded to projects being developed in research centres of the province of Barcelona. The LAB AECC 2024 grant, with an amount of €300,000, will go to the project “Lac2Brain: Engineering gut microbiota bacteria for the treatment of glioblastoma”, led by Maria Lluch, researcher at the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine of the UAB (IBB-UAB). The AECC Predoctoral Grant will provide €80,865 in funding to predoctoral researcher Clàudia Fáundez to develop her project “ERK5 protein inhibitors to improve the efficacy of immunotherapy in endometrial cancer” in the Protein Kinases and Cancer Laboratory of the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) and the Institut de Neurociències of the UAB (INc-UAB).

Lac2Brain

“Lac2Brain: Engineering gut microbiota bacteria for the treatment of glioblastoma” is a synthetic biology project that aims to design an innovative therapy for glioblastoma, a very aggressive type of brain cancer associated with a high mortality rate. Gut bacteria produce compounds that affect health and can even affect organs such as the brain. The microbial composition of the gut varies in cancer patients and can influence their response to treatments such as immunotherapy. This project seeks to genetically modify intestinal probiotics to produce immunostimulatory molecules and improve the response against these tumours. In addition, this approach could be applied to other brain disorders through personalised probiotics.

The project will be led by Maria Lluch, PhD in biotechnology from the UAB. Lluch did a stay at the Georg August University of Göttingen (Germany) and a postdoc stay at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), in the Biological Systems Design group led by Prof Luis Serrano. In 2012 she was recognised as an independent Miguel Servet researcher and opened a research line in synthetic biology within the group, and was co-coordinator of several European projects aimed at engineering Mycoplasma pneumoniae to treat respiratory diseases. As a result of more than ten years of this research, six patents, three books and 48 publications in high impact journals, such as Nature Communications and Nature Biotechnology, among others, were generated. She is co-founder and scientific director of Pulmobiotics, a spin-off company that engineers a lung bacterium for the treatment of immunotherapy-resistant lung cancer. In 2023 she started her research group at IBB-UAB in the framework of a European Union TALENT call, where she will develop the project awarded by the AECC together with three other recently awarded projects, also based on bacterial engineering.

ERK5 protein inhibitors to improve efficacy of endometrial cancer immunotherapy 

Endometrial cancer encompasses tumours that develop in the endometrium, the inner lining of the uterus, and is the most common gynecological cancer in developed countries. The number of cases has increased dramatically in recent years. Standard treatment is based on surgery and chemotherapy, but advanced and metastatic cases have a poor prognosis. Recently, immunotherapy based on checkpoint inhibitors was approved to treat advanced endometrial tumours. Immunotherapy generally enhances the antitumour action of the patient's immune system. However, many patients with solid tumours such as endometrial cancer do not respond to immunotherapy. New therapeutic strategies are therefore needed to improve the efficacy of immunotherapy.

The Spanish Association Against Cancer has awarded predoctoral researcher Claudia Faúndez Vidiella a grant to investigate the use of pharmacological inhibitors of the ERK5 protein to improve the efficacy of immunotherapy in endometrial cancer. ERK5 controls cancer cell proliferation and survival, and ERK5 inhibitors have shown antitumour activity in preclinical models of different types of cancer, including endometrial cancer. Preliminary data suggest that ERK5 inhibitors could enhance the efficacy of immunotherapy. The project will study the effects of ERK5 inhibitors on the anti-tumour immune response using human cell lines, cancer patient samples and animal models of endometrial cancer. In a second phase, the effect of these inhibitors as immunotherapy enhancers in endometrial cancer will be studied.

Researcher Clàudia Faúndez Vidiella graduated in Biomedical Sciences from the UAB in 2022. She spent a semester at the University of Kent (Canterbury, UK), and a research stay at the Immuno-Oncology Laboratory of the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute. In 2023 she completed the UAB Master in Transnational Biomedical Research at the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute VHIR (2022-2023). She is currently working on her PhD thesis at the Protein Kinases and Cancer Laboratory of the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) and the Institut de Neurociències of the UAB, directed by Prof Jose Miguel Lizcano.

Increasing cancer survival

The main objective of these grants, like all those promoted by the AECC, is to increase cancer survival rates in order to exceed 70% in 2030. To this end, the grants promote the improvement of treatments received by patients and their quality of life. The AECC 2024 Grants cover all phases of the research career, and its strategic lines are to increase funding with special attention to low-survival cancers, attract research talent to promote job stability for researchers, and encourage and promote innovation and clinical research so that the results reach patients.