The Joint Research Unit in Advanced Therapies in Oncology, established by Universitat Jaume I in Castelló, the Príncipe Felipe Research Centre (CIPF) in Valencia and the General University Hospital of Castelló, will collaborate on the MORPHEUS project, funded through a 2025 European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant awarded to researcher María Jesús Vicent, Head of the Therapeutic Polymers Laboratory at CIPF and Distinguished Researcher at Universitat Jaume I (UJI). The unit will also participate in the MITONano project, funded by the Spanish Association Against Cancer (AECC). The European MORPHEUS project (Mechano-metabOlic Responsive nanoPlatform for HeterogEnous tumor Suppression) aims to develop a new generation of intelligent nanomedicines capable of "reading" the physical and metabolic characteristics of individual tumours and delivering treatment in a precise, sequential manner. The project focuses on solid tumours that are resistant to current therapies, beginning with cholangiocarcinoma, an aggressive and difficult-to-treat bile duct cancer. Its long-term goal is to establish a therapeutic strategy that can be applied to other cancers characterised by dense, rigid tumour environments, such as pancreatic cancer. MITONano proposes an innovative nanomedicine-based approach that specifically targets mitochondria, the energy-producing structures within tumour cells. By disrupting this energy supply, the treatment aims to inhibit tumour growth and survival while sparing healthy cells. These nanomedicines incorporate active compounds that act directly on mitochondria, making it possible to treat even the most chemotherapy-resistant forms of ovarian cancer. The project will also evaluate tools to identify which patients are most likely to benefit from this personalised therapy.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive breast cancer subtype characterized by limited targeted treatment options, a high propensity for distant metastasis and variable responses to immune checkpoint blockade. Increasing evidence indicates that the tumor microbiome can influence cancer progression and therapeutic responses, yet the mechanisms through which intratumoral bacteria reshape the TNBC microenvironment remain poorly understood. Fusobacterium nucleatum, a Gram-negative anaerobic bacterium associated with several cancers, has been detected in breast tumors and linked to metastatic progression, but its contribution to metabolic and immune regulation in TNBC has remained unclear.

Stowers Institute for Medical Research Investigator Julia Zeitlinger, Ph.D., and her team partnered with Google DeepMind on AlphaGenome Atlas, a new AI-generated resource released today that predicts the molecular effects of more than 9 billion possible single-letter DNA changes across the human genome. Zeitlinger's lab used the Atlas to map regulatory motifs — the short DNA sequences that help determine which genes are turned on and off — at base-pair resolution across hundreds of cell types, work that would be impractical to do experimentally. The one-petabyte resource is searchable through a web browser without writing code, allowing researchers to prioritize which genetic variants and biological mechanisms to investigate first. Researchers from Google DeepMind, Stowers, Broad Institute, the University of Exeter, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Stanford University contributed scientific input and tested applications of the resource.