Exploring cell-to-cell heterogeneity and exploiting epigenetic regulation for the interception of myeloid disease cells.

Disease interception is a novel concept referring to treatment of a disease before the disease fully develops by removing altered cells. To make disease cell interception a reality we will need to overcome two key challenges. First, we will need to be able to identify few altered disease cells among many healthy ones.

Second, we need to develop strategies that allow to specifically target disease cells but do not affect healthy cells.

In the INTERCEPT-MDS ITN we propose to approach these challenges through research and the shared multidisciplinary and multisectorial training of 12 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs). As a result we will build and present some of Europe’s first experts in the novel field of disease cell interception.

We will take advantage of single-cell omics methods that have reached a level of maturity to be applied on a broad-scale.

For interception, we will explore and exploit the epigenetic regulatory space and use our privileged access to tool compounds and our capacity to perform genetic screenings in vivo and in vitro.

We will focus on myeloid diseases because they are a suitable paradigm for clonally evolving diseases and come with a major advantage.

In contrast to most other diseases is the availability of stem cells, niche cells and their progeny through samples of the clinical routine. Finally, we will address technical challenges by developing novel research tools.