Virgen del Rocío participates in a national project to activate precision medicine in childhood cancer.

The SEHOP-PENCIL study aims to facilitate access to personalized medicine for all children and adolescents with cancer regardless of their place of residence.

A spaceship accompanies children in their fight against cancer in Virgen del Rocío.

Facilitate access to precision medicine for all children and adolescents with cancer, regardless of their place of residence. This is the objective of the Sehop-Pencil project, developed by the Spanish Society of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology (Sehop), in which several services of the Virgen del Rocío University Hospital participate.

Over a four-year period, the objective is to design and evaluate a national childhood tumor sequencing program to implement personalized medicine among the standards of diagnosis and treatment and thus improve survival.

To facilitate access to sequencing techniques and precision medicine for all children with cancer, a network of experts from Spanish pediatric oncology centers has been established with ten nodes that will have the capacity to sequence samples arriving from other hospitals. This will help minimize travel for patients.

Specifically, according to a press release, it is planned that 180 children will be included in treatment in the Pediatric Oncology service of Virgen del Rocío (HUVR). The samples will be analyzed by professionals from the Pathological Anatomy service of the same hospital and will be deposited, with the authorization of the patients or their legal guardians, in the HUVR-IBiS node of the Biobank of the Public Health System of Andalusia.