A technological platform to combat cancer therapy resistance
The development of resistance to cancer therapy is one of the most frequent reasons for the failure of anti-cancer treatments. Therapy resistance is linked with tumor-recurrence and has devastating consequences for the clinical outcome of the individual patient and causes increased costs for public health systems. The understanding of mechanisms of resistance-formation and the development of strategies directed towards the resensitization of resistant tumor cells to cancer therapy represents one of the most important challenges to modern cancer research. P-CARE will strengthen the collaboration between Italian and Austrian research institutes in the areas of genetics, biotechnology and the cancer clinics and generate a technical platform to investigate mechanism of therapy resistance formation, aiming to increase the efficacy of therapeutic treatments.
The project will develop a shared platform for the identification of drugs capable to re-sensitize resistant tumors to conventional oncologic treatments by the repositioning of drugs already approved for the treatment of other pathologies. Further, P-CARE will implement strategies of precision medicine aiming to overcome resistance to anti-cancer immunotherapy by reproducing the immune response of the tumormicorenviroment in vitro. P-CARE will build an efficient trans-border network for sharing technology and knowledge that will be made accessible for academic and clinical cancer research in and outside the Programme area.