Pediatric Cancer Center inaugurated at Sant Joan de Déu Children’s Hospital in Barcelona

A photograph of the lobby at Pediatric Cancer Center at Sant Joan de Déu Children’s Hospital in Barcelona, where a large screen displays the writing

The Pediatric Cancer Center at Sant Joan de Déu Children’s Hospital in Barcelona seeks to offer the best possible care to children and adolescents with cancer—and their families—while also advancing research that will help us better treat and cure the diseases that affect them. The Center, whose creation the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) helped support, was officially inaugurated on Thursday, June 16.

Watch to get a sense of the mission of the Pediatric Cancer Center.

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By centralizing specialist services for those facing cancer to provide a single point of access, the Pediatric Cancer Center seeks to offer comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and personalized care that leads to the best attainable outcomes for patients. A Molecular Oncology Laboratory, for instance, gives doctors the capacity to tailor treatment based on the specific genetic abnormalities observed in a given tumor. And care for the children the Center serves does not end once their course of treatment concludes; support services help kids get back to enjoying real life.

While offering advanced therapies that are available at only a handful of treatment facilities around the world, the Center also seeks to make itself widely accessible and welcome more than 400 new patients each year.

The Center’s research and clinical teams are integrated with one another, ensuring that patients get care based on the latest and best knowledge and creating the conditions for meaningful advancement in treatments. A pediatric tumor biobank and Spain’s first clinical trial unit focused on pediatrics serve as the foundation for the Center’s research strategy.

The cornerstone of the Center was laid in October of 2018 at an event where a new grant commitment from the Leo Messi Foundation and matching grant commitment from SNF brought its fundraising goals to completion.

Health is a core focus for SNF, whose ongoing Health Initiative seeks to help make quality care accessible to all by building infrastructure (including three new hospitals across Greece), supplying state-of-the-art equipment, offering training to medical professionals, and fostering a mental health support system for young people in Greece. SNF also partnered with Sant Joan de Déu Children’s Hospital through the Foundation’s global COVID-19 relief initiative, supporting the creation of a biobank open to all researchers to contribute to science’s understanding of the disease’s impact in children and pregnant women.