Four companies and centers in Catalonia join international consortium to study immune response to cardiac prostheses
InKemia IUCT Group, Catalan Institute of Health, Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute and Mind the Byte play a key role in clinical research and the discovery of potential drugs.
By Biocat
Heart-valve disorders are the third cause of cardiovascular disease and replacement of these valves is the second most common procedure in cardiac surgery. Over the coming four years, an international consortium of 13 hospitals, research centers and SMEs will research the factors that lead to failure in these biological prostheses and how to improve their lifespan.
Participants from Catalonia are business group InKemia IUCT, the Catalan Institute of Health, the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (Idibell) and start-up Mind the Byte. Other prestigious partners include the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, the Nantes University Hospital Center (France), University College of London (United Kingdom), Tel Aviv University (Israel), the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), The Regents of the University of California (United States) and Italian biotechnology firm Avantea.
The project is called Translink (Defining the role of xeno-directed and autoimmune events in patients receiving animal-derived bioprosthetic heart valves) and has a budget of €7.8 millions from the European Union.
Members of this consortium hope that their results will lead to preventative solutions, developing prosthetic heart valves without the antigens that trigger immune response, and in treatment, through bioabsorbants of the antibodies associated with prosthesis damage.
Each year, 300,000 patients benefit from animal-derived bioprosthetic heart valves, which have advantages over mechanical prostheses including lack of dependency on anticoagulants. The downside is the shorter lifespan of these prostheses, which is a higher risk for younger patients. If the desired results are obtained, treatment could be applied to patients under 65, potentially benefitting some three million people around the world.
The Catalan members of this consortium play a key role in both clinical research and the development of experimental models to see the causes of damage to these valves, as well as in the discovery of new treatments to avoid it. Dr. Josep Castells, president of InKemia IUCT Group, believes that it is a consortium “with the top specialists in each area of knowledge, on a molecular level, in diagnostics, in surgery.” And he highlights the presence of SMEs, “which will allow for fast implementation of the results obtained, allowing them to reach patients in a reasonable period of time.”
Although it is a wide-reaching research consortium, the project is divided into subprojects and only the partners working on drug discovery (InKemia, Idibell and Mind the Byte) will have the exploitation rights to drug candidates. For founder and CEO of Mind the Byte, Dr. Alfons Nonell-Canals, “It is a cutting-edge scientific project and a clear example of the need for multidisciplinary collaboration.”