We all know someone touched by cancer. And although science is all about facts and evidence, it can also be about our personal stories and emotions.
Erika Pineda Ramírez lost her dad to cancer. Alba García-Fernández lost her grandmother and aunt, also to cancer. They are now doing research with the goal of finding more effective treatments for cancer patients.
In 2024, Alba and Erika started working on NanoGlue, a new approach to help the immune system fight cancer more effectively. Their project is funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), through the ARISTOS Postdoctoral Program in Biomedicine and Health Sciences and it is developed at CIBER-BBN, Centro de Investigación Principe Felipe, and Universitat Politècnica de València.
To mark World Cancer Day, they joined our European Research Executive Agency colleague and breast cancer survivor, Sofia Pereira Sá, for a conversation on the cancer cells’ ability to hide from the immune system, the heavy side effects of treatments and the hope NanoGlue can bring to millions of patients.
More effective treatments with less heavy side effects
Sofia Pereira Sá: Let’s first talk about your MSCA-funded project. What is NanoGlue and what can its results and findings mean for patients like me?
Alba García-Fernández: Our ultimate goal is to provide more effective treatments with less side effects to improve patients’ quality of life. We do this by designing new nanoparticles and then activate the immune system of the patients to attack the tumour.
This kind of immunotherapy would be more effective and would help avoid and limit undesirable side effects, that we see with current treatments.
Erika Pineda Ramirez: We also want to study the interaction between the cancer cells and the immune cells in a metabolic level. We would then be able to propose novel and more efficient therapies.
Recent reports in Spanish news outlets have referred to the NanoGlue innovative treatment as a “superglue” for triple negative breast cancer, a notoriously aggressive form of the disease.
Sofia: Can the project’s approach have broader applications, benefiting patients with other types of cancer?
Erika: First, I want to explain why we called it a “superglue”; it is because our nanoparticles will enhance the immune system’s ability to detect and respond to cancer, helping the body to attack the cancer and kill it.
Alba: The nanoparticles are a versatile platform, and we can select and modify them depending on our needs. We chose to test it with triple negative breast cancer because it represents a major health challenge. It’s a good starting point for validating our nanoparticles.
Sofia: How are you combining different scientific areas and how can that be crucial to achieve better scientific results?
Erika: We work with experts in nanotechnology, biotechnology, biology, metabolomics, and oncology. Having all these people with different expertise helps us see the problems from different angles and find better solutions.
The future of cancer research – a patient’s perspective
Erika: What was the biggest challenge for you as a patient?
Sofia: The side effects played a big role when it came to my physical and mental wellbeing. Especially because all these side effects prevented me from being the mum I wanted to be for my one and half-year-old son. I couldn’t play with him, I couldn’t bathe him, I couldn’t take him to school. This was the hardest part of the whole treatment. It was heartbreaking.
My diagnosis was made in summer 2023 and after 20 rounds of chemotherapy I still feel some side effects, such as the so called “chemo brain”. I’d love to see therapies advance in a way that gives patients a better quality of life.
Erika: Besides reducing side effects, what do you think researchers should be aware of doing cancer research?
Sofia: Being only 34 years old and seeing the chemotherapy medication going into my bloodstream and knowing that I was somehow “poisoning” myself to get treated was a very traumatic experience. Thankfully, you and other cancer researchers are already tackling that by trying to find more targeted therapies.
A second thing I think is important is fertility. More and more young women are being diagnosed with hormonal breast cancer exactly when they are planning to have children. I wish researchers could find a way to preserve breast cancer patients’ possibilities of still becoming mothers.
The future of cancer research – a scientist’s perspective
Sofia: What do you think cancer researchers will be focusing on in the next years?
Alba: My immediate thought is personalised medicines for both treatment and diagnosis.
Erika: I totally agree with Alba – personalised medicine is the future but also having more multidisciplinary because we need expertise from different areas.
Sofia: What is your experience with EU funding, and how do you think it will be relevant for your work on NanoGlue?
Alba: I have had previous experience with EU funding, as I was part of a project funded by the EIC Pathfinder programme for cancer therapy. It is thanks to EU funding that us researchers can work on innovative ideas like this and explore different paths. I believe NanoGlue is a next level initiative for our future.
Erika: EU funding helps us take ideas and turn them into actions. I wanted to do cancer research for years, but in Mexico, my home country, I didn’t have much support to do it. The MSCA funding gave me this great opportunity of working in this field with top researchers, and to use equipment I didn’t have the opportunity to use before. For me, it was a dream come true.
Discover more
Check out what the European Commission is doing to improving the lives of more than 3 million people by 2030 through cancer prevention and cure – EU Mission: Cancer. For more MSCA news and funding opportunities, visit out our dedicated page.
Curious to find out more about Alba and Erika’s research? You can check out ARISTOS’s website and follow them on social media:
Alba García-Fernández: LinkedIn
