Transgene Participates in New Cancer Research Consortium

Regulatory News:

Transgene (Euronext Paris: TNG), a biotech company that designs and develops virus-based immunotherapeutics against cancer, announces its participation in the launch of PERSIST-SEQ, a new international consortium of academic and industrial leaders in the field of cancer research.

This collaborative research program aims to provide the cancer research community with a new gold standard workflow for single-cell sequencing by developing and validating best practices as well as generating and analysing high-quality data. The project aims to empower the scientific community to unravel drug resistance and develop smarter therapeutic strategies to better treat cancer and prevent resistance. PERSIST-SEQ is a five-year public-private partnership, funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), and led by the Oncode Institute and AstraZeneca.

Cancer takes 9.6 million lives each year, 90% of which result from untreatable cancer relapse occurring after initially effective treatment. Therapeutic resistance is one of the primary causes of cancer death and is clinically difficult to predict, prevent or treat. Although resistance has been studied extensively in the last decades, there is no comprehensive understanding of its underlying mechanisms, nor how they differ between cancer types or therapies. A better understanding of these mechanisms can contribute to better patient stratification, the development of effective drug strategies targeting the resistance mechanisms as well as improved cancer treatment strategies. Moreover, resistance is a major industrial challenge since it causes failure in the drug discovery and development process. Therapeutic resistance is largely unpredictable and difficult to model. Therefore, better tools are needed to identify or predict resistance mechanisms. These tools would, in turn, decrease the costs and risks associated with cancer drug development significantly.

“Drug resistance in cancer is one of the greatest causes of mortality and despite increasing success with targeted therapies in the clinic, how cancer cells survive drug treatment is still not well understood. We are excited to co-lead this European industry-academic partnership, using state-of-the-art single-cell sequencing to characterise 5 million single cells over 5 years to understand and overcome drug resistance” said Ultan McDermott (AstraZeneca), industrial co-lead of PERSIST-SEQ.