Hospitals and translational research centers from six European countries participates in Coltheres Consortium Coltheres will use colon cancers as a ‘test-bed’ to define specific biomarkers useful for design targeted treatments. The consortium is open to any pharmaceutical developer who wishes to determine which patients are most likely to respond to their novel cancer therapy and perform rapid proof-of-concept clinical trials.

The Consortium comprises clinical units that are pioneering biomarker testing for targeted therapies and leading translational research groups with a proven track record in developing companion diagnostics for cancer therapies. Importantly, the Consortium includes two SMEs Horizon Discovery, UK, and Agendia, The Netherlands. Horizon will develop novel cancer cell models that incorporate new predictive biomarkers of drug responses, determined by the Consortia’s profiling of large clinical trial patient cohorts. Agendia will develop molecular based genetic tests to predict patients’ response to therapy based upon tumour-derived genomic signature.

The director of the Program for Epigenetics and Cancer Cell Biology IDIBELL, which participates in the consortium, Manel Esteller, explained that “Coltheres has been designed to incorporate personalized cancer therapy in clinical practice using colorectal tumors as a paradigmatic model”. Esteller expressed his satisfaction to be a partner of this EU funded project, which brings

about international experts in the fields of functional genomics and epigenomics, pharamacogenetics, bio-informatics and clinical oncology. He explained that the contribution of IDIBELL to Coltheres “will be obtain

epigenomic profiles in patients and experimental models in order to find new prognostic and drug resistance biomarkers in colo-rectal cancer