MADRID — The survival numbers are brutal. Twenty percent. That is the share of children with rhabdoid tumours who live past five years under current treatment.
Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation — the standard toolkit — is not working for these patients. Most are infants.
Alfonso Alba Bernal, a researcher from Rincón de la Victoria on the Costa del Sol, is now in a Madrid lab trying to change that. He works with the paediatric oncohematology group at La Paz University Hospital. His project targets rhabdoid tumours specifically — not childhood cancer broadly.
The distinction matters. Rhabdoid tumours are rare.
They also are uniquely aggressive. They appear in the brain, the kidney, the liver. Atypical rhabdoid teratoid tumours in the brain.
Extracranial malignant rhabdoid tumours elsewhere. Alba Bernal lists the locations plainly. The common thread is early onset.
These cancers strike in the first years of life. What makes rhabdoid tumours biologically strange is what makes them hard to treat.
Most cancers accumulate many mutations. Rhabdoid tumours depend on the loss of a single gene. That genetic simplicity drives their aggression.
It also blocks standard therapies. There is no specialised treatment.
The team at La Paz sees the paradox: fewer mutations should mean a simpler target. But the immune system does not attack them on its own. The research now focuses on CAR-T therapy.
This is not a new idea in oncology. But applying it to rhabdoid tumours is. CAR-T works by engineering a patient’s own immune cells to recognise and kill cancer cells.
The premise is straightforward: if the tumour displays recognisable signals on its surface, the body can be trained to find them. The team is working with Antonio Pérez Martínez, head of the Pediatric Hematology-Oncology Department at La Paz, to test that premise.
The larger picture here is not just one lab in Madrid. It is a shift in how paediatric oncology approaches rare, hard-to-treat cancers. For decades, the strategy was to adapt adult protocols.
Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation. The results for rhabdoid tumours stayed dismal.
The side effects for very young children stayed severe. The field is now moving toward biology-driven treatments. CAR-T is one example.
Others include targeted therapies based on genetic profiling. Alba Bernal’s position is postdoctoral. He is early-career, leading a project that could define a treatment path for a disease that currently has none.
The work is collaborative. The team is described as highly qualified.
The hospital is one of Spain’s largest paediatric centres. That combination — a young researcher, a specific tumour type, a hospital with resources — reflects a broader trend in European cancer research. Small teams are taking on narrow, difficult problems.
Funding is tight. The payoff is uncertain.
But the alternative is accepting a 20 percent survival rate. The project is still in the research phase. No clinical trial results are reported yet.
The question the team is asking is basic: can the immune system be taught to see these tumours? The answer is not guaranteed. The genetic simplicity that makes rhabdoid tumours so aggressive also makes them hard for the immune system to detect.
Few mutations mean few distinctive markers on the cell surface. That is the core challenge.
For now, the work continues in the lab. The children who could benefit are very young. The timeline is unclear.
But the direction is set. A researcher from the Costa del Sol, working in a Madrid hospital, is trying to turn a grim statistic into something else.
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