Mission of PrECISE

PrECISE aims to improve patient risk-stratification and treatment in prostate cancer by developing new computational approaches to exploit next generation molecular data. The expected outcome is the development of a predictive computational technology that can exploit molecular and clinical data to improve the understanding of disease mechanism and to inform clinicians about optimized treatment strategies.


Motivation

Despite of their great promise, high-throughput technologies in cancer research have often failed to translate to major therapeutic advances in the clinic. One challenge has been tumour heterogeneity, where multiple competing subclones coexist within a single tumour. Genomic heterogeneity renders it difficult to identify all driving molecular alterations, and thus results in therapies that only target subsets of aggressive tumour cells. Another challenge lies in the integration of multiple types of molecular data into mathematical disease models that can make actionable clinical statements. PrECISE aims to develop predictive computational technology that can exploit molecular and clinical data to improve our understanding of disease mechanisms and to inform clinicians about optimized strategies for therapeutic intervention. We will focus on two urgent clinical needs in prostate cancer:

  • distinguishing the many indolent tumours from the minority of lethal ones, and
  • providing rationally chosen treatment options for patients with advanced disease.