About PERSIST-SEQ

Therapeutic resistance is one of the primary causes of cancer death and is clinically difficult to predict, prevent or treat. Although resistance has been studied extensively in the last decades, there is no comprehensive understanding of its underlying mechanisms, nor how they differ between cancer types or therapies. A better understanding of these mechanisms can contribute to better patient stratification, the development of effective drug strategies targeting the resistance mechanisms and the design of better cancer drugs. Moreover, resistance is a major industrial challenge since it causes failure in the drug discovery and development process. Therapeutic resistance is a process which is unpredictable and difficult to model. Therefore, better tools are needed to identify or predict resistance mechanisms. This would, in turn, decrease the costs and risks associated with cancer drug development significantly. Importantly, solutions to prevent or target therapeutic resistance will enhance the development of new therapeutics and market opportunities.

Current experimental approaches fail to study residual disease, the major cause of cancer relapse, and therapeutic resistance in clinically meaningful ways. In the last years novel single-cell sequencing has seen significant advancements. Such techniques combined with advanced cancer modelling approaches can shed light on the intricate processes underlying therapeutic resistance and residual disease. Understanding the mechanisms of cancer resistance is crucial to enable its mitigation and requires a coordinated effort. To address these challenges, PERSIST-SEQ has formed a coalition of field-leading researchers and medical oncologists on cancer resistance who will leverage their ingenious cancer modelling approaches and cutting-edge techniques to perform the sequencing of single tumour cells. PERSIST-SEQ will refine and standardise a broadly applicable workflow for single-cell sequencing in order to improve the understanding of therapeutic resistance in cancer and develop targeted prevention and mitigation techniques.