€12M EU Grant To Uncover Mechanisms That Determine Cell Fate

Barcelona, Spain and Aarhus, Denmark -- February 13, 2012 -- Today European scientists are meeting to kick off the 4DCellFate project, funded by the European Commission under the FP7 program. The 4DcellFate project will tackle the question of how the Polycomb Repressive Complex (PRC) and Nucleosome Remodelling and histone Deacetylase (NuRD) complexes function across the genome and time during differentiation, by applying cutting-edge technologies, such as structural biology, microscopy, proteomics, high-throughput sequencing, and computational modeling.

"Understanding how the PRC and NuRD complexes determine cell fate is a prerequisite for developing models for diseases, such as cancer, that can be used both for further research and for developing personalized medicine therapies." states Director of R&D at CLC bio, Dr. Roald Forsberg, and continues, "The 4DCellFate project is a truly interdisciplinary and innovative project that will generate a wealth of experimental data. We look forward to applying our expertise in building integrated bioinformatics frameworks for handling, visualizing, and integrating all this data and to build new computational models of diseases to help researchers better understand these mechanisms."

ICREA Research Professor and group leader at the CRG in Barcelona, Luciano Di Croce, adds, "This network has brought together the optimal mix of expertise, laboratories, techniques, and resources to finally elucidate how the fate of a cell is decided and how to apply this knowledge to regenerative medicine."

Comprising 8 academic institutions, 3 biotech companies and 1 pharmaceutical company, the 5-year EU-funded project aims to translate basic research findings into new research and medical solutions with a budget of almost 12 million Euros.

The partnering organizations involved in the project are the University of Cambridge (UK), Fundació Privada Centre de Regulació Genòmica (Spain), Copenhagen University (Denmark), Universitair Medisch Centrum Utrecht (Netherlands), Universiteit Antwerpen (Belgium), European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Germany), Max Planck Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V. (Germany), Istituto Europeo di Oncologia SRL (Italy), Horizon Discovery Limited (UK), Cellartis AB (Sweden), Glaxo Smith Kline (UK), and CLC bio (Denmark).

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