Welcome to the first issue of our e-newsletter

Dear PERSIST-SEQ colleagues and subscribers,

Happy New Year! We are excited to kick off 2023 with our first newsletter, and share with you our ambition and progress to date.

Finding drug combinations to overcome cancer drug resistance is extremely challenging. This has prompted research to focus on so-called persister cells, cancer cells capable of surviving treatment, despite often harbouring the right drug target.

To address the gap in our knowledge, and to better identify new drug combination strategies to target persister cells, the PERSIST-SEQ consortium which is a public-private partnership funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative and led by the Hubrecht Institute and AstraZeneca, was formally launched in July 2021.

PERSIST-SEQ’s goal is to create a single-cell sequencing ‘roadmap’ of the way cancer cells survive and persist following drug treatment. This will help scientists design new treatments with the potential to improve patient outcomes.

Last year, we advanced our efforts by preparing study technical plans, and getting ethical approvals in place for sharing data and study samples within the consortium. We established PERSIST-SEQ Standard Operating Procedures for the sequencing of cells, an effort which will increase the quality and consistency of the gathered data and facilitate the future use of our approaches in follow-up initiatives.

In September 2022, the consortium held its first face-to-face meeting in Cambridge, UK, where consortium members from various work streams shared their progress, experiences and discussed work plans.

We look forward to 2023 during which we will continue our work on study technical plans and sample submissions to the PERSIST-SEQ initiative, and initiate data analysis.

Our next PERSIST-SEQ newsletter will arrive in six-months’ time – in the meanwhile please visit our project website here for regular updates.

Until next time!

Dr. Ultan McDermott and Dr. Viia Valge-Archer, Project co-leads, AstraZeneca
Dr. Alexander van Oudenaarden, Project co-lead, Hubrecht Institute
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