The research team led by Jesús San Miguel, professor of Hematology at the Universidad de Salamanca and head of the Department of Hematology at the Hospital Universitario de Salamanca, works hand in hand with another team from the Centro de Investigación Médica Aplicada (CIMA), a center for applied medical research in Pamplona (Spain), conducting studies on new therapeutic agents to enhance patients’ immune response against cancer. Specifically, their chief objective is to bring this type of clinical research to hematological malignancies working with the team led by Ignacio Melero Bermejo, researcher at CIMA.

A study conducted by the Instituto de Neurociencias de Castilla y León (Incyl), an institute of neurosciences at the Universidad de Salamanca (Spain), has proved the increased expression of a protein called connexin 43 contributes to reduce an oncogene (a gene turning a normal cell into a tumor cell). In this case, we refer to the oncogene c-Src in glioma stem cells, the most common brain tumor. Consequently, the study suggests that connexin 43 may be useful to develop new therapies against brain tumors.

The Centro de Investigación del Cáncer (CIC), a cancer research center in Salamanca (Spain), is performing trials with a drug proven effective in preclinical studies against Ewing’s sarcoma, a type of cancer affecting mostly children and young adults. This rare disease primarily has an impact on bones, but also on other soft tissues; scientists think that at least a group of patients with poor prognosis may benefit from a therapy that is also being under studies to fight other neoplasms.

The European Commission has launched a project under the Seventh Framework Programme in which a dozen partners from universities and companies work together in order to sequence the genome of leukemia patients; the main objective is to design tailored and more effective therapies. The study is to be conducted between 2013 and 2015 and a research team from Salamanca is participating as the only Spanish partner.

Polymorphism is the existence of various alleles of the same gene. It refers to variations in the sequence of a given DNA fragment among individuals of a population and, if they affect the coding or regulatory sequences and cause major alterations in the protein structure or in the regulation of its expression, may produce different phenotypes. In recent years, it has become clear that genetic polymorphisms may have a great importance regarding the individual response to physical exercise. The Instituto de Biomedicina de la Universidad de León (Ibiomed), and institute for biomedicine, is working on this research area.

According to recent research, some hearing disorders caused by auditory-vestibular nerve damages are currently clinically undetectable, but they have important functional consequences, mainly because they lead to hearing impairment in noisy environments. The Instituto de Neurociencias de Castilla y León at the Universidad de Salamanca (Incyl), a neuroscience center in Spain, has formulated a theory to explain the impact those damages have on hearing and have come up with a method to simulate the problem in order to analyze it.