"There are many challenges. Obviously the main one is to expand the success of CART19 to other CARTs, especially for lymphomas. It is also important to control their side effects and, as in all complicated and expensive therapies, another important challenge is to find a way of making them available to everyone who needs them without that availability depending on the financial resources or location of the people concerned."

"Treatment for patients with MDS is becoming more and more personalised. In the coming years we are going to see more emphasis on the genetic mutations associated with MDS. Every patient has a different pattern of mutations and these mutations can be used to indicate how the patient should be treated. The mutations can be used to establish the diagnosis, determine the prognosis and to predict which therapies will be the most efficacious."

MLL-AF4 translocation is the genetic marker that characterises acute lymphoblastic leukaemia B (ALL-B) which is especially aggressive, commonly affects children under the age of one, and which responds poorly to treatment with chemotherapy, survival rates for this disease being less than 30%.

This particular article, under the direction of Dr. Sanjuan-Pla, focuses on what is known about this form of leukaemia, some of the particular characteristics of studying a disease that appears in such young patients, and goes on to mention what the group hopes will be the result of the application of new technologies in this field of research. 

The new machine purchased jointly with funds from the Josep Carreras Foundation and European FEDER funds has been installed in the Shared Platforms Unit at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Barcelona.