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Osteosarcoma is a rare disease – found in less than 0.2% of all diagnosed cancers – that affects mainly children and adolescents. It represents 2% of all the cancers that are diagnosed in children of 0 to 14 years and 3% of those diagnosed in adolescents of 15 to 19 years. Improving the survival of patients with osteosarcoma is one of the challenges in medicine and science, as the survival rate is 30% in patients with metastatic tumours.
The standard therapy for treating osteosarcoma consists of extirpating the tumour with negative margins and resecting bone areas larger than the tumour to ensure that no cancerous cells are left next to the tissue that is eliminated.
Researchers from the Plasmas for BioMedical Applications Laboratory (PlasmaMED Lab) of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC), are working to develop a new treatment for bone cancer, which avoids the secondary effects of conventional treatments – such as chemotherapy – and enables bone regeneration when the tumour has been surgically resected.
Specifically, the new treatment uses cold atmospheric plasma to generate reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS), which can induce the death of malign cells and ensure the administration of the RONS treatment in the tumour area, without side effects.
As part of the TRANSFORMER (Transforming bone cancer therapy with composite biomaterials encapsulating plasma-generated RONS) project, a product will be developed that combines, for the first time, biomaterials for bone regeneration with an innovative treatment based on plasma gas-treated hydrogels.
Budget and funding
TRANSFORMER has funding of 150,000 euros, through the Proof of Concept (PoC) grants of the European Research Council (ERC), within the Horizon Europe 2021-2017 programme. The project started in November 2022 and is expected to end in April 2024.
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