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PERSIST-SEQ: International Research Consortium Aims to Build a Reproducible Single-cell Sequencing Workflow to Capture Tumour Persistence
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.
A new international consortium of academic and industrial leaders in the field of cancer research is pleased to announce the launch of “PERSIST-SEQ”. PERSIST-SEQ formally launched on 1st of July 2021. This collaborative research program aims to provide the cancer research community with a new gold standard workflow for single-cell sequencing by developing and validating best practices as well as generating and analysing high-quality data. The project aims to empower the scientific community to unravel drug resistance and develop smarter therapeutic strategies to better treat cancer and prevent resistance. PERSIST-SEQ is a five-year public-private partnership, funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), and led by the Oncode Institute and AstraZeneca.
In order to achieve this goal, PERSIST-SEQ will develop a standardized approach to single-cell sequencing workflows for the investigation of cells pre-treatment. Importantly, PERSIST-SEQ will employ an open access model to build and sustain its benchmarking procedures and centralized European data infrastructure. This model reduces duplication of effort, thereby promoting collaboration across disciplines and ensuring efficient adoption of state-of-the-art single cell technologies. By presenting an approach which is replicable, the PERSIST-SEQ consortium will facilitate a further investigation of unaddressed tumours and therapies. Therefore, the real impact of the project will stem from the growth of innovation capacity associated with the use of this approach across academic and industrial centres around the world.
Ultan McDermott (AstraZeneca), industrial co-lead of PERSIST-SEQ, said:
“Drug resistance in cancer is one of the greatest causes of mortality and despite increasing success with targeted therapies in the clinic, how cancer cells survive drug treatment is still not well understood. We are excited to co-lead this European industry-academic partnership, using state-of-the-art single-cell sequencing to characterise 5 million single cells over 5 years to understand and overcome drug resistance.”
Prof. Alexander van Oudenaarden (Hubrecht Institute), Principal Investigator of PERSIST-SEQ, commented:
“I am very excited to be part of this consortium. Not only because of the importance of understanding tumor drug resistance, but also because we will perform this project in close collaboration with industrial partners. I am sure we will learn a lot from each other.”
Read the PERSIST-SEQ consortium press release here.