Welcome to the second issue of our e-newsletter

Dear PERSIST-SEQ colleagues and subscribers,

This is our second newsletter in which we share with you our progress to date and future plans.

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, 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.

To date, in PERSIST-SEQ, there have been 86,518 persister cells sequenced, with lung cancer as the predominant tumour type and colorectal cancer coming second. Regarding sample types – leading are cell lines, with organoids as the second biggest group, patient biopsies – third, and cell line xenografts – the smallest.
 
In the past six months, we’ve advanced our efforts to develop study technical plans, and obtainethical approvals 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 use of our approaches in future initiatives.

In June 2023, the consortium organised its second face-to-face meeting in Strasbourg, France. Researchers and project managers from various work streams  shared their  progress and discussed the next steps for data e analysis and publication and dissemination of results.

We look forward to the second half of 2023 as we continue to work on sample submissions to the PERSIST-SEQ initiative.

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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