—Martí, you have blood cancer.

Ona Lloveras was born with Shwachman syndrome, a rare inherited disorder that causes the pancreas and bone marrow to malfunction. She was diagnosed at the Parc Taulí Hospital in Sabadell at the age of two. Until she was six, Ona was frequently hospitalized for neutropenia, anemia, bronchitis, and various infections. At age 12, her bone marrow began to fail, leading to severe myelodysplasia, a type of pre-leukemia. In April 2013, the family was informed that the only solution was a bone marrow transplant, as chemotherapy would not resolve the problem in her case. No compatible donor was found, and so, on May 27, 2013, they opted for an umbilical cord blood transplant. Afterward, Ona—who was 13 at the time—spent many months hospitalized and isolated at Vall d'Hebron Hospital, first due to the transplant itself and then because of intestinal and skin rejection and the numerous infections she faced. "After a lot of things I don't want to remember anymore, I was able to go home," she explains now. However, she clarifies: "Home care didn't prevent a lot of trips back and forth to the hospital and having to take a lot of medication."

Fear in capital letters is the fear that something bad will never happen to your child. Dani Alba (Sant Pere de Ribes, 1973) approaches this abyss with the novel Dandelion (LaBreu), a fiction based on reality: the 399 days of wake and anguish for her son Jan—Jana in the fiction—at the Vall d'Hebron. The novel moves swiftly and vibrantly—without sentimentality or morbidity—toward the new world that appears when life forces you to take a break.

Oryzon Genomics shares rose this Monday after learning that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has authorized the initiation of a Phase Ib clinical trial of the molecule yadademstate for sickle cell anemia (SCA). This drug is used against highly aggressive cancers such as leukemia and works by blocking the action of a protein called LSD1, which has been shown to promote tumor cell multiplication.

In many cancers, it often happens that patients with the same mutation develop differently and do not respond equally to treatments. For a long time, there was speculation that the reason for these differences could be genetic or, for example, related to the age of the patient. However, none of these arguments could explain by itself the diversity of responses of patients to an identical alteration in a specific oncogene – a gene that has undergone a mutation and that has the potential to cause cancer.

Ten years of research and over 6,000 pages of information that support its quality, safety and efficacy confirm that immunotherapy with CAR-T will be the treatment of the future for the most resistant leukaemia in Catalonia and Spain. A future that is becoming more and more immediate, since the Spanish Agency of Medicines and Health Products (Aemps) has authorised this Wednesday the exceptional and hospital use of CAR-T ARIO-0001 in severe patients with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. This promising gene therapy is based on the laboratory modification of the lymphocytes in charge of the immune response to make the body react and attack the tumour cells on its own. It is estimated that at least 25 people with leukaemia who do not respond to conventional treatments could be treated annually at the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona, which has developed this personalised medicine. For the time being, patients will have to be over 25 years old.