NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The European Commission will give €8.4 million ($11.7 million) to fund research efforts that will use genomics and proteomics to develop new screening techniques for pancreatic cancer.
The integrated project, which will be coordinated by Philipps-Universitaet Marburg, will include groups involved in pancreatic cancer research in Europe in order to develop molecular diagnostics for the prevention, early diagnosis, and risk stratification of pancreatic cancer. These screening techniques will include strategies for diagnosing solid tumors as well as pharmacogenomic tools for individual drugs.
These grants will be based on large-scale transcriptome, genome, and proteome analyses that have been conducted through two previous EU-funded programs and actions that optimized and adjusted common standards and established a research group. The new programs will aim to develop tools including those used in DNA, RNA, and PCR analyses, serum proteomics, epigenetic and transcript analyses, chip technology, and molecular imaging.
The three-year project will use clinical samples such as serum, urine and others collected through large multinational European trials, and toward its end researchers will design and start new clinical trials of novel diagnostics.
Participants in the network include: The University of Liverpool; Queen Mary University of London; Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum; University of Verona; University of Bochum; Schering AG; Universitatsklinikum Heidelberg; Cyclacel; Tepnel Life Sciences; Westfaelische Wilhelms-University, Muenster; Advalytix AG; Asper Biotech; Karolinska Institute; Forschungsverbund Berlin; University of Ulm; Fundacio Imim; Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel; The Spanish National Cancer Research Center; the National Cancer Registry (Ireland); and Munich Technical University.