It is called Mycoplasma pneumoniae and, despite being very simple, this small bacterium with only 680 genes could play a key role in fighting lung cancer, the type of tumor that causes the most deaths each year worldwide: nearly two million. I'researcher Luis Serrano and its team, at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona (CRG), have spent years studying this microorganism and genetically modifying it to strip it of its ability to cause disease. Now they want to turn it into a kind of Trojan horse capable of releasing drugs against tumor cells only in the lung.

Barcelona has now definitively agreed to establish a subsidiary of the German Fraunhofer Institute, one of the world's leading applied research centers. This is the first establishment of that organization to open in Spain. The President of the Generalitat (Catalan Government), Salvador Illa, will lead the signing ceremony of the institutional protocol for the launch of the Fraunhofer Center for Applied Theragnosis (Fraunhofer-CAT) this Friday, along with the Minister of Science, Diana Morant, and the Mayor of Barcelona, ​​Jaume Collboni, as well as the President of Fraunhofer.