Editorial
“I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done”. This is what Marie Curie said, referring to how fast time passes. We’ve already arrived at the fall edition of Oncode’s digital magazine, and we believe it is important to have in sight both what has been done and what remains to be done. With the launch of this new issue, we have more than one thing to be proud of and to keep an eye on in the upcoming time.
Alain Kummer
Managing Director
Chris De Jonghe
Valorization Director
Geert Kops
Scientific Director & Head of the Institute
As 90% of the deaths caused by cancer result from untreatable cancer relapse occurring after initially effective treatment, the launch of the international PERSIST-SEQ consortium – with Oncode Investigator Alexander van Oudenaarden as Principal Investigator – brings hope. Although therapeutic resistance has been studied extensively in the last decades, for now there is no comprehensive understanding of its underlying mechanisms, nor how they differ between cancer types or therapies. This Oncode led consortium aims to provide the cancer research community with a new gold standard workflow for single-cell sequencing. It has academic and industrial leaders join hands to unravel therapeutic resistance and develop smarter strategies to better treat cancer and prevent drug resistance.
“I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done”
Oncode and NKI have recently spined out Oncosence, a company targeting senescence in oncology. Let by Oncode Investigator Rene Bernards, the company will take the next step to discover and develop therapeutics that exploit senescence to target tumours, following five years of research into senescence and its role in tumour biology. Now, with already identified and validated targets and an initial investment from the Oncode Bridge Fund, the company is gearing up to raise additional funds to develop them clinically.
Read more about Oncosence and the launch of PERSIST-SEQ in the Eureka section. And don’t miss out on the discussion between Henk Verheul (Radboudumc and Oncode Institute) and Sipko Mulder (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport) on Affordable Healthcare in this issue’s Dialogue section. Read further to get to know Oncode Investigator Lude Franke better, and to dive deep into the science and the workings of Titia Sixma’s lab at the NKI through our Lab Visit.
Enjoy reading!
Outsmarting cancer
impacting lives
