New strategy to combat metastasis

The weekly supplement Dinero of La Vanguardia has published an article about Ona Therapeutics, the spin-off created by IRB Barcelona, ICREA and the researchers Salvador Aznar-Benitah and Valerie Vanhooren, with funding from Sabadell Asabys. Based on results published by Aznar in the journal Nature in 2017, the company aims to find a new treatment for metastatic cancer. “We found that the cells that give rise to metastasis are “addicted” to fats, and we envisaged developing a product, an antibody, that can block the protein responsible for fat uptake in these cells and thus combat their proliferation,” explains the researcher.