Nov 29, 2021
New Interdisciplinary Consortium to Overcome Therapy Resistance in Cancer
Cells of a sarcoma cancer cell line cultivated in the laboratory also develop differently. Cell components can be stained and made visible under the microscope (in blue: cell nucleus, green: metabolic enzyme glutamine synthetase, red: actin). In such a way, the scientists can examine the behavior of the cancer cells and test their reaction to active substances.
Therapy resistance is a central problem in the treatment of cancer. Bone and soft tissue tumors, known as sarcomas, in adolescents and young adults also often do not respond to treatment in the long term. The HEROES-AYA interdisciplinary research consortium now wants to find out how the molecular heterogeneity of sarcomas leads to therapy resistance. As part of the National Decade against Cancer, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the project with a total of over 15 million euros over five years. The Dresden research group leader Dr. Anna Poetsch heads the Data Science work package together with colleagues from NCT and KITZ Heidelberg.
As the disease progresses, cancer cells develop a variety of new properties, often developing resistance to drugs that were originally effective. The “Heterogeneity, Evolution, and Resistance in Oncogenic fusion gene-Expressing Sarcomas affecting Adolescents and Young Adults” (HEROES-AYA) consortium aims to gather comprehensive molecular data to understand tumor evolution. The researchers will focus on exploring tumor heterogeneity, i.e., how many diverse subpopulations with different properties and morphologies exist within the tumor. From this, the researchers hope to derive fundamental insights into how tumors develop resistance and with this will develop ways to overcome it.
“We gather data from multiple different genome-wide measurements for the whole tumors as well as single cells from a variety of different areas of the tumor. This heterogeneity and multidimensionality of datatypes requires complex computational analyses,” says Dr. Anna Poetsch, Mildred Scheel Early Career Center (MSNZ) research group leader at the Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC) at TU Dresden and the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT/UCC) Dresden.
Together with Dr. Moritz Gerstung (DKFZ), Dr. Anna Poetsch leads the Data Science work package of the consortium. Joining forces with Dr. Daniel Hübschmann (NCT-HD) and Dr. Natalie Jäger (KITZ-HD), the group will be responsible for the challenge to extract biomedical information from multiple datatypes to understand and model the tumors’ behaviors.
The HEROES-AYA project is led by scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), the National Centers for Tumor Diseases (NCT) in Heidelberg and Dresden, and the Hopp Children's Tumor Center Heidelberg (KiTZ). A total of twelve research institutions are involved.