Successful funding acquisition within the ERA PerMed Joint Transnational call 2021

The project "Treatment decision based on organoids in gastric cancer" coordinated by the Surgical Research Laboratory of the Dept. of Visceral, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery, University Hospital Dresden, was selected as one of 20 projects from a total of 204 pre-proposals for funding in this year’s call. The REDESIGN consortium is scientifically coordinated by Dr. Franziska Baenke and consists of four research groups led by Dr. Daniel Stange from the University Hospital Dresden, Dr. Steffen Rulands from the MPI for the Physics of Complex Systems Dresden, Dr. Mette Nordahl Svendson from the in University of Copenhagen and Dr. Bon Kyoung Koo from the IMBA in Vienna. The REDESIGN consortium will use patient-derived organoids (PDOs) to help guide personalised treatment in gastric cancer patients in the future. By integrating functional analyses from pre-and post-treatment derived PDOs, the consortium aims to unravel treatment resistance mechanisms and design treatment strategies that consider the causes of resistance. Importantly, the patient's point of view in personalised treatment decisions will be taken into account with the support of members of the Patient Advisory Board of the NCT Dresden. The overarching aim is to improve personalised treatment by combining the gained knowledge of evolutionary trajectories and mechanisms of resistance to therapy as well as addressing ethical and social challenges when using PDOs to aid clinical decision making in the era of precision medicine. The REDESIGN consortium is funded with a total of 1.65 million Euros for three years planning to start in 2022.

ERA PerMed is an ERA-NET co-funding alliance supported by 32 partners of 23 countries and co-funded by the European Commission. This alliance is to align and promote national research strategies, strengthening excellence and research collaborations of European players in Personalised Medicine.