ROMA (ITALPRESS) – Understand not only the genetic vulnerabilities on which cancer cells depend, but also the biological mechanisms that determine them in order to predict them even in still unexplored tumor contexts. This is the ambition of PRECISE (Predictive Relationships Explaining Cancer Genetic Interactions and Synthetic Essentiality), the new European consortium of which Human Technopole is co-founder. Born to overcome a predominantly descriptive approach in the field of cancer study, PRECISE is the first European coordinated initiative dedicated to understanding, modeling and predicting tumor dependencies, whose scientific vision was presented in an article published last July on Nature Genetics. In recent years, the functional genomics of cancer has produced systematic maps of its genetic dependencies, the so-called Cancer Dependency Maps, which have transformed oncological research. These have enabled the identification of the weak points of cancer cells by opening new perspectives for the identification of new therapeutic targets and the development of precision medicine. The limit of these maps, however, is that they describe these dependencies by explaining only partially the biological mechanisms that determine them and, above all, do not allow to predict their occurrence in tumor contexts still unexplored experimentally. PRECISE was born to fill this gap. By integrating functional genomics, experiments that modify tumor cells in a controlled manner to observe the response, multimodal data and artificial intelligence, the consortium will develop predictive models capable of explaining why a certain vulnerability emerges in a specific tumor and to foresee it also in those tumors that have not yet been characterized experimentally. Human Technopole participates in the project through four research groups led, respectively, by Francesco Iorio, Andrea Sottoriva, Piero Carninci and Nereo Kalebic, which bring together complementary skills in computational biology, functional genomics, pharmacogenomics, cancer evolution and artificial intelligence applied to life sciences. Francesco Iorio is also among the creators of the scientific vision that led to the birth of the consortium.
“The biology of cancer is entering a new era: the predictive one. PRECISE combines the main European skills in functional genomics, artificial intelligence and computational biology to pass from description of tumor vulnerabilities to their prediction. Our ambition is to develop generalized models capable of guiding experiments, accelerate the discovery of new therapeutic targets and expand the scope of precision oncology,” explains Francesco Iorio, Senior Research Group Leader of Human Technopole. “One of our objectives is to significantly reduce the number of cancer patients whose genome does not currently provide indications for targeted therapies.” One of the distinctive features of PRECISE is the close integration between computational models and biological experiments. The predictions generated by computational models based on artificial intelligence will in fact guide new experiments in the laboratory, while experimental results will gradually improve the ability of models to interpret the complexity of cancer. Underlines the director of the Human Technopole Marino Zerial Foundation: “Biology no longer has a problem of data scarcity, but of ability to interpret them. Understanding the mechanisms governing tumor vulnerabilities is the necessary step to transform data into predictive models and new therapeutic opportunities. PRECISE represents exactly this paradigm shift and fully reflects the vision of Human Technopole: integrating different skills and approaches at European level to face challenges that no institution could support alone and speed up research transfer to patients. ”
– photo screenshot site Human Technopole –
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