About the VHIR
Here at the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) we promote biomedical research, innovation and teaching. Over 1,800 people are seeking to understand diseases today so the treatment can be improved tomorrow.
Research
We are working to understand diseases, to find out how they operate and to create better treatments for patients. Get to know about our groups and their lines of research.
People
People are the centre of the Vall d'Hebron Research Institute (VHIR). This is why we are bound by the principles of freedom of research, gender equality and professional attitudes that HRS4R promotes.
Clinical trials
Our work is not just basic or translational; we are leaders in clinical research. Enter and find about the clinical trials we are conducting and why we are a world reference in this field.
Progress
Our aim is to make the research carried out at the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) a driving force for transformation. How? By identifying new channels and solutions for the promotion of people's health and well-being.
Core facilities
We offer specialist support for researchers, internal and external alike, ranging from specific services to preparing complete projects. All this, from a perspective of quality and speed of response.
News
We offer you a gateway for staying up to date on everything going on at the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR), from the latest news to future solidarity activities and initiatives that we are organising.
Speaker: Dr. Julia Kzhyshkowska, Head of Dept. of Innate Immunity and Tolerance. Institute of Transfusion Medicine and Immunology, Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University.
ÀBSTRACTCancer is one of the leading causes of death, reduced quality of life and disability worldwide. cancer-specific and patient-specific programming of innate immunity is needed for in the success in development of new anticancer therapies, for improving the efficiency of immunotherapeutic tools, and in the personification of conventional therapies needs to consider. Intratumoral TAMs and their precursors, resident macrophages and circulating monocytes, are principal regulators of tumor progression and therapy resistance. The lecture will elucidate the progress in the identification of in subpopulations of circulating monocytes and intratumoral TAMs and their increasing number of biomarkers, indicating their predictive value for the clinical parameters of carcinogenesis and therapy resistance. The state-of-the-art will be presented in our knowledge on the tumor-supporting functions of TAMs at all stages of tumor progression and highlight biomarkers, recently identified by single-cell and spatial analytical methods, that discriminate between tumor-promoting and tumor-inhibiting TAMs, where both subtypes express a combination of prototype M1 and M2 genes. Novel mechanisms involved in the crosstalk between epigenetic, signalling, transcriptional and metabolic pathways in monocytes and TAMs will be addressed. The lecture will next focus on the molecular mechanisms that TAMs use to interfere with anticancer therapeutics, and will summarize and critically evaluate the most advanced data from the clinical trials, which are divided into 4 categories: inhibition of TAM survival and differentiation, inhibition of monocyte/TAM recruitment into tumors, functional reprogramming of TAMs, and genetic engineering of anti-tumor macrophages.
Host: Dr. Matilde LLeonart, Research group leader "Head and neck cancer: Biomedical Research in Tumor Stem Cells" Vall Hebron Institut de Recerca (VHIR)