The group of Metabolism and cellular signals at Biomedical Research Institute Alberto Sols led by Juan Manuel Zapata focuses its research on studying the regulation of TNF receptor, TRAF family of proteins and how changes in abnormal expression of these proteins may be involved in the development of leukemia or lymphoma. Zapata explained his progress in the last session of IDIBELL series of seminars held on July 8.
“The best way to check if a factor is involved in the etiology of a disease is changing the expression in an animal model the same way as happens in the human patient,” explained Zapata. “If the change is the cause of the transformation, the mouse will develop the disease.” Zapata’s group has achieved a transgenic mouse model that develops a specific phenotype of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

Once the disease model is characterized in the mouse, the next step is to find “new drugs and new therapies that improve health of the mouse because they could likely also benefit human patients.”

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia presents complex phenotypes and different etiologies. Therefore Zapata warns that once you have developed an animal model “it is not expected to work for all patients, we must seek specific phenotype among patients in order to apply on them our findings in the animal model.” “To get to personalized medicine is important to obtain specific animal models for different subtypes of disease.”

In addition to the transgenic mouse of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, Zapata is currently working with other animal models of Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphomas and Mulibrey dwarfism.