ATRYS HEALTH, a global company providing precision medical prevention, diagnosis and treatment services, and Hospital Sant Joan de Déu in Barcelona have today opened the Nuclear Medicine service at the hospital's ATRYS-SIMM SJD Centre.
ATRYS has taken over the management of this new service through its subsidiary SIMM Molecular (SIMM), which specialises in medical diagnosis through Nuclear Medicine molecular and metabolic imaging.
The newly opened service will offer new diagnostic imaging and treatment options to children affected by various conditions, but above all by tumours, who are currently treated at the SJD Pediatric Cancer Center Barcelona (PCCB). That is why the new service is located within its facilities.
The diagnostic tests performed at the Nuclear Medicine service will also benefit patients from Nephrology (urinary tract infections, transplants, obstructive pathology), Endocrinology (thyroid scintigraphy and treatment of hyperthyroidism), Neurology (assessment of epileptic seizures and the energy requirements of each brain region), Rheumatology (bone densitometry) and Traumatology.
Every year, around 1,400 patients at Hospital Sant Joan de Déu undergo a diagnostic test of this kind.
In the field of oncology, the new facilities offer the opportunity to advance in the treatment and research of paediatric tumours, also known as developmental tumours.
They include two lead-shielded metabolic therapy rooms in which some tumours can be treated with radiopharmaceuticals. The new therapeutic options include strategies in which drugs labelled with (radioactive) radionuclides are administered, directed against specific tumour targets labelled with antibodies (immunotherapy): radioimmunotherapy. These strategies will increase the specificity and efficacy of the new treatments.
Researchers from the SJD Pediatric Cancer Center Barcelona and SIMM will launch several lines of research to develop different markers that will, in the future, make it possible to extend radioimmunotherapy to all paediatric solid tumours.
The new Nuclear Medicine Service, which will also treat adults, has three state-of-the-art scanners for the metabolic diagnosis of tumours, using advanced PET-CT and SPECT-CT imaging techniques, in addition to the two lead-shielded rooms.
Opening ceremony
The opening ceremony of this new area of the PCCB was led by the Executive Chairman of ATRYS, Santiago de Torres; the Managing Director of Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, Manel del Castillo; and Drs Isabel Roca and Joan Castell, medical directors of ATRYS-SIMM and founders of SIMM.
The event was attended by health authorities and numerous representatives of the healthcare sector and the business world.
According to Santiago de Torres, Chairman of ATRYS, “we are proud to run the Nuclear Medicine Service of the PCCB, which makes it possible not only to diagnose faster but also to improve the prognosis of cancer in children thanks to the most cutting-edge medical equipment, as well as to determine precisely the extent of the disease and the response to treatment. This collaboration with Sant Joan de Déu is further proof of our commitment to excellence, to improving quality of care and to diagnostic accuracy”.
Manel del Castillo, Managing Director of Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, noted that “the Nuclear Medicine service represents a very important step forward for the diagnosis, treatment and research of rare and complex diseases that many of our patients present, and adds value to a centre that is already a pioneer in its own right, such as the SJD Pediatric Cancer Center Barcelona”.