Joan Oró Grant Supports Research to Predict the Progression of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms

Combining what medical images reveal about an aneurysm with each patient's molecular information could help explain why some aneurysms grow faster than others. This is the approach underlying the doctoral research of Ager Uribezubia, a predoctoral researcher at the Sant Pau Research Institute (IR Sant Pau), who has received a Joan Oró grant through the FI 2026 call to study the progression of abdominal aortic aneurysms and develop tools to better predict their evolution.

The project, co-supervised by Dr. Maria Sabater Lleal and Dr. Josep Munuera, brings together the expertise of the institute's Complex Disease Genomics Unit and Advanced Medical Imaging, Artificial Intelligence and Image-Guided Therapy Group. The research is being conducted as part of the Biomedical Engineering doctoral program at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and integrates medical image analysis with genetic, molecular, and clinical data.

The Joan Oró grant, administered by the Agency for the Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR), provides €27,928.03 in funding, covering the first year of employment, training activities, and academic supervision of the doctoral program. The initial award covers 12 months, with the possibility of renewal for up to three additional years. Employment expenses are co-financed at 40% by the European Social Fund Plus.

More Information to Assess Each Patient's Risk

Abdominal aortic aneurysms are enlargements of the main artery that carries blood to the lower part of the body. They often cause no symptoms, but rupture can have severe consequences. Aortic diameter and its rate of increase are important measurements for monitoring aneurysms and assessing the need for intervention. However, these measurements do not fully explain why the disease progresses differently from one patient to another.

“In addition to diameter, we want to study aneurysm volume and shape, aortic tortuosity, calcifications, and the presence of a thrombus, an accumulation of clotted blood inside the vessel. We will analyze these characteristics automatically using computed tomography images to determine which are associated with faster growth,” explains Ager Uribezubia.

The research is primarily based on the Triple A Barcelona Study (TABS), a cohort that brings together information from more than 500 patients at three Spanish hospitals, including Sant Pau, with an average follow-up of three years. The availability of medical images, clinical data, and biological samples from these patients makes it possible to jointly investigate changes in aneurysm structure and the molecular processes that may accompany them.

Connecting Medical Images With Disease Mechanisms

Using this information, the project will investigate the relationship between aneurysm characteristics and genetic data, microRNA expression—small molecules that regulate gene activity—and circulating proteins. The goal is to identify potential markers of disease progression and gain a more profound understanding of the biological mechanisms involved in aortic enlargement.

“We want all this information to help answer specific questions about patient monitoring, such as when an aneurysm should be reassessed or when intervention may be appropriate. To achieve this, we will need to determine whether combining imaging and molecular data allows us to predict disease progression more accurately,” the researcher notes.

The next step will be to integrate the most relevant variables into predictive models designed to estimate aneurysm growth and the risk of rupture and evaluate their performance using data from other international cohorts.