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project info
Start date: 1 May 2023
End date: 31 December 2027
funding
Fund: European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)
Total budget: 10 304 277,00 €
EU contribution: 6 321 435,69 € (67,23%)
programme
Programming period: 2021-2027
European Commission Topic
European Commission Topic

ONCO Prime: new possibilities for personalised cancer therapy based on primary cell culture from the patient, omic characterisation and functional tests.

The aim of the project is to fight cancer more effectively by creating an innovative ONCO Prime research platform, responding to a number of current challenges and barriers in the development of new, personalized cancer therapies. According to data from the European Commission and WHO, approx. 3.5 million Europeans find out that they have cancer. This means that every 9 seconds a new case of cancer is diagnosed. A critical stage in the development of drugs is clinical phase II, which is successfully passed by less than 25% of the test substances. Lack of clinical effectiveness of anticancer is the main reason for failures. Many causes of inefficiency come down to insufficient understanding of the mechanism of action and lack of reliable evaluation of effectiveness in preclinical studies. Established cell lines, which have been used for decades as standard models of disease, have many limitations. A common phenomenon is the acquisition of genetic changes by cells and strong selection pressure under standard breeding conditions. These changes accumulate during repeated passages and lead to phenotypic changes. An innovative breakthrough of this impasse will be the ONCO Prime platform, which will enable the identification of new therapeutic targets, molecular classification of patients and testing of drugs in a unique system of primary cancer cell cultures isolated directly from patients. The platform will address the limitations of current cancer models and bridge the gap in preclinical research capabilities, increasing efficiency and lowering the costs of drug development, breaking down current technological barriers and enabling more effective therapies. ONCO Prime will become a source of models with the highest translational potential, including disease history, histopathological, genomic and transcriptomic data, enabling the correlation of clinical and molecular data.

Flag of Poland  Kraków, Poland