The Team

Javier Hernández Losa

Director of Molecular Biology Laboratory Department at Vall d'Hebron University Hospital

Santiago Ramón y Cajal Agüeras

Head of Translational Molecular Pathology at Vall d'Hebrón Research Instituter

Our objective

The fundamental objectives of the group are the study of molecular tumour pathology related to the identification of new diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic targets.

One of the goals of this study in particular was to assess how the immunohistochemical expression of the markers that are part of the signaling act as independent predictors of the risk of metastasis or variables of global survival.

We combined up to 48 factors related to demographics, prognosis, biomarkers and clinical follow-up from 101 patients and provided that information to an external biostatistician.

Given the exhaustive exploratory approach of this study, we were forced to invest a significant amount of time and money in technical meetings with the biostatistician in order to discuss each step forward in the discovery process.

Which Was The Contribution Of ?

One of the most interesting relationship identified with was that patients at stage T3cN0M0 and high levels of expression of p4E-BP1 show a higher index of Ki67 than those with low/mid levels of expression. This relationship supports the idea that mTOR signalling way has a relevant role in the tumoral growth.

In this work we combined classical statistical tools (hypothesis testing) with the automated exploratory analysis of

Which Was The Contribution Of ?

Key Features

The key features of applied to this work were

• 1 The depth of analysis, which allowed us to identify relevant markers that were potentially associated to particular subsets of our patients (patients at different stages, tumour samples with different levels of regulation of protein synthesis, etc.).
• 2 The Hypo Booster tool to easily focus on the most relevant factors potentially involved to be tested in a further confirmatory study, and thus minimizing the number of meetings with the biostatistician.
• 3 The traceability of the results,which enabled an effective integration with classical statistical tools (such as SPSS).