SJD Barcelona is spearheading the BCC18 trial, a new treatment for high-risk neuroblastoma

SJD Barcelona Children’s Hospital is the first and only centre outside North America to offer the BCC18 protocol, an international trial aimed at improving the chances of cure for patients with high-risk neuroblastoma. The treatment involves adding anti-GD2 immunotherapy with naxitamab to conventional treatments; this has been shown to be capable of eradicating chemotherapy-resistant disease.

Neuroblastoma is the most common solid tumour in childhood, and the high-risk form remains one of the deadliest paediatric cancers, with survival rates of just 30% until very recently. According to Dr Jaume Mora, scientific director of the Paediatric Cancer Centre Barcelona (PCCB) at SJD Barcelona, by combining treatment with naxitamab, we have achieved an 85 per cent overall survival rate at three years in patients with high-risk neuroblastoma in first complete remission.

“BCC18 is the new clinical trial that enables us to offer our patients all the knowledge we have gained in recent years on how to integrate anti-GD2 immunotherapy into the overall treatment regimen for patients with high-risk neuroblastoma,” says Mora.

Early treatment

Over time, specialists have observed that patients who achieve complete remission following initial treatment are those most likely to survive in the long term. This is precisely why the BCC18 trial, sponsored by Beat Childhood Cancer (BCC), is aimed at patients aged between 0 and 21 with newly diagnosed high-risk neuroblastoma.

What is new about the study is that, from the moment of diagnosis, the treatment incorporates the anti-GD2 antibody naxitamab, a therapy that helps eradicate the disease when it becomes resistant to chemotherapy. The aim of the study is therefore to enable a greater number of patients to achieve complete remission of the disease.

For Dr Mora, the combination of early immunotherapy, specialised surgery and multidisciplinary treatment is one of the best options currently available to try to cure a disease that continues to pose a major challenge for paediatric oncology.

The key role of SJD Barcelona

In November 2025, the SJD Paediatric Cancer Centre Barcelona (PCCB) at SJD Barcelona Children’s Hospital joined the Beat Childhood Cancer (BCC) research consortium, which specialises in developing clinical trials for paediatric cancer. Its role, as the only centre outside North America, is to promote the consortium’s studies to patients worldwide.

Furthermore, SJD Barcelona was the first hospital in the world to administer naxitamab (marketed in the United States as DanyelzaⓇ) in June 2017 – an antibody developed at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York and approved by the US FDA in November 2020. Since then, more than 300 patients from around the world have received immunotherapy with naxitamab at our centre.