Dr. Rafael Correa-Rocha, founder and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of ThyTech and researcher at the Gregorio Marañón Health Research Institute (Madrid, Spain), has participated for the second consecutive year as an invited speaker at the 8th Treg-Directed Therapies Summit 2026, which has just concluded in Boston.
He delivered the presentation “Uncovering Clinical Advances with thyTregs™ to Expand the Frontiers of Treg Therapy,” selected by the conference organizers as one of its featured sessions.
Specifically, the company presented its clinical experience with thyTregs™, a cell therapy derived from thymic tissue, highlighting the favorable results achieved in pediatric heart transplant patients, as well as its ongoing development as an allogeneic therapy, which will enable expansion into other immune-mediated indications. The session addressed the clinical advances of thyTregs™, its therapeutic potential, and its scalability for future applications.
Dr. Correa-Rocha was accompanied by researchers Esther Bernaldo de Quirós Plaza and Marta Martínez-Bonet, co-founders of ThyTech, as well as María Luisa Berenguer Muñoz, CEO of Farmalider and ideaTx, and José Ángel Sánchez-García, Biotech Innovation Director at the Farmalider ideaTx Group, an investor and industrial partner in the development of ThyTech. This collaboration is aimed at supporting the company’s growth and enabling its future scalability from executive, regulatory, technical, and industrial perspectives.
This international congress brought together biopharma companies, academic institutions, and experts in clinical development, manufacturing, regulation, and investment in Treg therapies. Among the most prominent organizations participating in the event were AstraZeneca, the NIH, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Nektar Therapeutics, and Quell Therapeutics.
Innovative therapy
ThyTech’s thyTreg® technology, fully developed at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital, is based on the therapeutic use of pediatric thymus tissue—typically discarded during certain pediatric cardiac surgeries—to obtain Treg cells with a very high potential to induce immune tolerance. This approach aims to prevent or reduce transplant rejection, autoimmune diseases, and other inflammatory conditions.
In the field of transplantation, one of the main clinical challenges remains the need for lifelong chronic immunosuppressive treatments, which carry a significant burden for patients. In this context, ThyTech’s thyTregs™ approach seeks to move toward a more precise alternative for preventing rejection and, in the future, to help reduce dependence on these treatments, ultimately improving the quality of life of transplant patients.
International recognition
ThyTech’s participation in Boston comes at a particularly significant moment for the Treg field. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Shimon Sakaguchi, Mary Brunkow, and Fred Ramsdell has reinforced the international visibility and scientific validation of this therapeutic approach.
The inclusion of the thyTreg clinical trial and the citation of Dr. Correa-Rocha’s work in publications supported by Nobel laureate Fred Ramsdell further establish ThyTech as an international reference in the clinical application of Treg therapies and as a high-value asset capable of attracting the interest of the pharmaceutical industry and the global scientific community.
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