In 2022, the San Juan de Dios Hospital (SJD) inaugurated the Pediatric Cancer Center of Barcelona (PCCB), an international center with the capacity to treat more than 400 new cases of childhood cancer per year. That same year, a pathway was created for families from Peru, most of them highly vulnerable and desperate due to their children's dramatic situation, who came to Catalonia to receive treatment in the hospital's oncology department. Now, the Catalan Health Department intends to put an end to this: they have detected regular flows of patients to the SJD, a privately owned public center, as well as the arrival of patients of other nationalities to Vall d'Hebron and Sant Pau Hospital, and they want to regulate it. When the PCCB was launched four years ago by the Peruvian medical director, Andrés Morales, the aim was to internationalize the center and attract patients from other countries in order to fill all the beds and make it profitable. Currently, 65% of the beds are occupied. According to data from the Catalan Health Department (Salut), foreign patients represented almost half of all minors treated at Sant Joan de Déu Hospital in 2025. Specifically, of the 252 children hospitalized, 123 were born outside of Spain. However, the majority of patients who have arrived since 2022 for cancer treatment are part of the public healthcare system; that is, they do not pay for treatment, as they would in a private hospital, and access services with a health card. In fact, the hospital treats almost two-thirds of all foreign pediatric patients in the Catalan healthcare system.

The most aggressive colorectal tumors have learned to evade the immune system and go undetected by its defenses. Although immunotherapies have revolutionized the fight against many types of cancer, colorectal cancer is still one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In most metastatic cases, patients do not respond to these drugs because their immune system does not recognize the malignant cells as a threat. But there is hopeful news. A study led by the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and the National Center for Genomic Analysis (CNAG) has discovered how these tumors manage to block the immune system and, therefore, limit the effectiveness of immunotherapy, the treatment that reactivates the body's defense cells to attack. The key: the hormone TGF-β. The researchers have found that, through a hormone known as TGF-β, colorectal tumors generate a double barrier that protects them from immune attack. "The issue is that the tumor microenvironment of more metastatic colon cancers is different from that of more benign ones and is characterized by the presence of TGF-β, an immunosuppressive hormone," Dr. Eduard Batlle, ICREA researcher and head of the colorectal cancer laboratory at IRB Barcelona, explained to ARA. "Malignant cells use this hormone to evade detection by T lymphocytes, the cells on which our immune system is based," he clarified.