Project description
Exploring the complex networks of gene regulation in tumours
Cancer often arises when the normal regulation of gene expression is disrupted. This can lead to changes in how cells behave, resulting in tumours that are diverse and difficult to treat. Intratumor heterogeneity contributes to tumour growth, metastasis, and resistance to therapies, complicating patient outcomes. Understanding these changes is essential for improving cancer diagnosis and treatment. The ERC-funded EpiCancer project aims to address these challenges by developing advanced techniques for analysing the epigenetic changes in cancer. By focusing on single-cell and single-molecule analysis, EpiCancer will link these changes to clinical outcomes and enhance cancer diagnostics through routine blood tests, offering hope for earlier detection and more effective treatments.
Objective
Epigenetic regulation of gene expression- the mechanism responsible for establishing and maintaining cellular identities during development- is frequently deregulated in cancer. Our working hypothesis is that this deregulation confers upon cells phenotypic plasticity, resulting in intratumor heterogeneity, which is key to tumor development, metastasis, and drug resistance. In EpiCancer, we seek to provide the technological means to address fundamental issues concerning epigenetics in cancer. Namely, we intend to develop, apply, and validate single-cell and single-molecule epigenetic analysis methods that can parse the function of this network and its heterogeneity in human cancer, and utilize it for cancer diagnosis.
We will build a rich arsenal of tools to profile the combinatorial epigenetic network in primary tumors and blood taken from cancer patients at multiple scales of resolution (Aims 1 + 2). We will apply these systems to elucidate the function and connectivity between epigenetic modifications in breast cancer and lymphoma, and link epigenetic heterogeneity to tumor biology and clinical outcome (Aim 3). We will also establish revolutionary systems for cancer diagnostics and monitoring, leveraging the unique advantages of our single-molecule tools for multi-modal analysis of epigenetic, protein biomarkers, and microRNAs, originating from both the tumor and its microenvironment, in patients’ blood (Aims 1 + 3).
The epigenetic technologies we intend to provide the scientific community are set to profoundly impact our understanding of the epigenetic determinants of cancer, as well as our ability to detect cancer at early stage from a routine blood test and identify early disease recurrence. The analysis of a large cohort of tumor and blood samples from the same patients will generate novel datasets that are expected to reveal cancer-specific and patient-specific epigenetic modules and shed light on the contribution of epigenetic plasticity to tumor biology.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesgeneticsepigenetics
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
7610001 Rehovot
Israel