Brazilian and foreign scientists from various fields are meeting this week at Unicamp to discuss new techniques and approaches to fighting cancer, a disease that is expected to register 781 new cases per year in Brazil until 2028, according to data released by the National Cancer Institute (INC) in early February.
The 3rd CancerThera Congress takes place this Thursday and Friday (12th and 13th) in the auditorium of the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FCM), with the participation of specialists in areas such as medicine, chemistry and physics, among others. This year, the theme of the meeting is "The challenges of translational research in Theranostics in cancer". Theranostics is the combination of concepts of therapy and diagnosis, and the idea is to discuss ways of bringing the advances obtained in academic research to the patient.
According to hematologist Carmino de Souza, head researcher at the CancerThera Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center (Cepid) and president of the Congress, the meeting opens space for debate on the latest advances in the development of radiopharmaceuticals and metallopharmaceuticals (precision medicines in which the physicochemical properties of a metal are used to perform molecular tasks). In addition, the seminar will discuss innovative diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for the care of cancer patients.
"The role of the Congress is to give everyone involved in Cepid the opportunity to see the research activities being developed and their respective results. Some are preliminary, others more definitive," said Souza.
“We are not just talking about irradiation. In cases of skin cancer, for example, we practically didn't talk about irradiation in the nuclear sense. We talked about photodynamic therapy, we talked about new drugs, we talked about metals,” he observes. Photodynamic therapy is a medical technique that uses the interaction between light and a light-sensitive drug to destroy diseased cells with extreme precision.
"When you know the enemy and know how many there are, where they are, and where they are going, you choose the weapons you will fight with," he states. "It's the same thing with cancer," he argues.
Carmino de Souza says the seminar will also discuss so-called "personalized medicine," in which treatment is individualized based on the unique characteristics of each organism.
Cepid CancerThera
Established at Unicamp in May 2023, the Cancer Innovation Center with Emphasis on Metals and Theranostics (CancerThera) aims to develop research, innovation, and knowledge dissemination activities for the creation of new metal-based drugs and radiopharmaceuticals for cancer diagnosis and treatment, including new uses for already known radiopharmaceuticals.
Furthermore, the center brings together researchers from diverse fields of knowledge, including clinical oncology, onco-hematology, chemistry, nuclear medicine, pharmacy, statistics, biology, and physics, adopting an innovative model in the country to transform itself into a world-class institution in the study of cancer.
Most common types of cancer
Men
Prostate (30,5%) – Colon and rectum (10,3%) – Lung (7,3%) – Stomach (5,4%) – Oral cavity (4,8%)
Women
Breast (30,0%) – Colon and rectum (10,5%) – Cervix (7,4%) – Lung (6,4%) – Thyroid (5,1%)
Source: INC
Alert
➔ An estimated 781 new cancer cases per year in Brazil during the three-year period of 2026-2028.
➔ 518 new cases of the disease annually, excluding non-melanoma skin cancers.
Cancer is approaching cardiovascular diseases as the leading cause of death in Brazil.
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