The TACTIC project at Vall d’Hebron held its fourth general meeting on 6 October, during which the participating groups shared the main scientific advances achieved in recent months across TACTIC’s two cross-cutting areas: Precision Prognosis and Diagnosis, and Innovative Therapies.

TACTIC is a project of the The Vall d’Hebron University Hospital Accredited Health Institute (IIS-IR-HUVH), which is part of the Fortalece–Salud programme of the Carlos III Health Institute. Its aim is to advance the development of new tools to improve disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment through computational biomedicine, innovative therapies and the transfer of knowledge into clinical practice, with a view to achieving more precise, personalised and accessible medicine for patients.

New advances in precision diagnosis and prognosis

Among the projects presented at the meeting, the Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders group at the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) highlighted the MONALISA study, the first randomised clinical trial of liquid biopsy in childhood cancer. Liquid biopsy is a less invasive alternative and, in some cases, the only viable diagnostic option, depending on the tumour’s location. Patient recruitment will begin at the end of 2025 at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, which will act as the reference centre in Spain for an international initiative involving more than twenty centres. The key role of the sample management system developed as part of TACTIC was also emphasised, as it has facilitated the collection of longitudinal samples for several non-invasive diagnostic projects.

The Clinical Neuroimmunology group at VHIR presented its progress in developing predictive models for multiple sclerosis. The team outlined several parallel development lines aimed at identifying patterns associated with disease progression. Key results include the creation of multimodal models to predict treatment response and clinical progression at different stages of the disease, as well as the development of web platforms to facilitate their implementation in clinical practice.

The Cancer Computational Biology group at the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) presented new results in the development of prediction models adapted to the data limitations commonly encountered in clinical settings. Its studies show that, in certain contexts, clinical data alone can generate predictive and prognostic models with performance comparable to that of more complex multimodal approaches. The group also presented progress in methodologies to remove technical effects that hinder the integration of data from different sources.

Innovative therapies to address unmet medical needs

Under the project’s second area, which focuses on innovative therapies, the Clinical Biochemistry, Drug Delivery and Therapy group at VHIR presented progress in new nanomedicine strategies for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. The team has developed three technological approaches based on extracellular vesicles, magnetic particles and hydrogels, all of which have yielded promising preliminary results. In parallel, the team has established a platform to collect exosomes from patients’ blood samples, enabling future associated omics studies.

The Therapeutics and Innovations in Neuropediatrics and other paediatric rare diseases group at VHIR shared preclinical results obtained with mesenchymal cell-based therapies and progress in applying gene-editing technologies to correct mutations responsible for rare neurological diseases. The team is also developing new viral vectors to enable the transfer of large genes, as well as digital biomarkers based on computer vision and video recordings to improve patient monitoring.

In addition, new insights were presented into the factors that influence the response to personalised deep brain stimulation, along with imaging studies that have identified associations between muscle fat accumulation and the progression of certain rare diseases. Some of these results are already beginning to be translated into clinical practice through the development of specialised registries for rare neurological disorders.

Systems medicine as a driver of translational research

As an example of the central role of systems medicine within TACTIC, the Cardiovascular Diseases group at VHIR presented advances both in understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying chronic diseases and in integrating large-scale clinical data.

The research team has identified a new mechanism through which glycation stress disrupts the mitochondria–lysosome axis and promotes cellular senescence. The team is currently exploring the pro-inflammatory consequences of this process and investigating the potential protective effects of specific drugs through in vitro studies and preclinical models, with a view to future clinical evaluations.

In addition, the group continues to develop multimodal data tools for personalised cardiovascular risk assessment. Through collaboration with the information systems teams at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, the group has successfully integrated hospital and community-based clinical data and made them interoperable with ten clinical centres in ten different countries. This infrastructure has enabled the development of natural language processing technologies in eight languages and the launch of proof-of-concept studies to improve cardiovascular risk prediction, which will soon evolve towards international federated networks.