Madrid (EFE).- The Niño Jesús public hospital in Madrid leads the Leukodomics research consortium, created to develop “virtual twins” of children and adolescents diagnosed with leukemia in order to simulate their response to each treatment, chances of success, possible toxicities and predict their evolution.
These are “personalized digital models” that will integrate genetic and biochemical information from the affected person and their malignant cells, based on computer technologies and algorithms from data science, explained the oncologist Manuel Ramírez Orellana, coordinator of the project that has obtained 1.85 million euros of European funds through the State Research Agency.
For the first time, computer resources are incorporated into the investigation of childhood leukemia allowing, in different simulated scenarios, to make “the best clinical decisions” without the need for direct intervention in the patient “thus minimizing the level of therapeutic risk”, according to the person in charge of the project.
Five research groups
The consortium, which is made up of five research groups with specialists in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics and Biology, has a period of two years to develop the tool that must be validated in subsequent clinical trials.
Experts from the Complutense University and the Research Institute of the Hospital 12 de Octubre (I+12) will participate, led by Professor Francisco Monroy; from the Laboratory of Mathematical Oncology at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, led by Gabriel Fernández; from the Computational Biophysics group of the Francisco de Vitoria University, directed by Diego Herráez; and the National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC), led by Dr. Carlos Torroja.
“The basic idea is to develop a tool that helps the oncologist to make decisions in the consultation in a few minutes”, indicated Dr. Ramírez.
The aim is to integrate into the system all the information on mutations and phenotypic traits that make it possible to identify “special traces that cause resistance to treatment and relapses” in patients who have had an initially positive behavior after being treated with chemotherapy, Professor Monroy pointed out.
To do this, the genetic, biochemical and biophysical data of the cancer cells of 100 cancer patients at the Niño Jesús hospital will be sequenced and stored, as a starting point for the research that will allow, through retrospective data, to make prospective decisions, specified the Dr. Ramirez.
A computational entity with all the patient information
After emphasizing that “data is gold”, Professor Herráez has defined the digital twin as “a computational entity that has all the patient’s information stored”, including the physical substrate of the pathological cells.
“It is new terrain, we will have to develop new methodologies” using advances in artificial intelligence, artificial vision and algorithms to progress in personalized medicine, Herráez added.
Gabriel Fernández has pointed out that “ten years ago it was almost chimerical to bring together doctors and computer scientists to offer a mathematical predictive tool”, using efficient biocomputational algorithms that require “the incorporation of massive information”.
The result, he added, will go hand in hand “with the volume of genomic sequencing data, a map of the characteristics of thousands of cells” to offer a prediction tool on how they will react to certain lines of treatment.
Acute infloblastic leukemia is the most frequent cancer in children and adolescents, and although eight out of ten manage to survive, it is the main cause of cancer deaths in children.
The cells of the hundred hospital patients will be thawed and sequenced to enter the data into the system, which will integrate all the information so that this new tool can be “transferable to other pathologies”, according to Dr. Torroja.
After presenting “the final product” within two years, if it is successful, it will take four to five years of application in the practice to validate its effectiveness with real cases.
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