PREDECT

PREDECT is one of the major Innovative Medicines Initiatives (IMI) of the European Union with 21 laboratories collaborating in a Public-Private partnership, aiming to create more appropriate in vitro platforms for target validation and drug discovery. Partners include pharmaceutical industry, academic and biotech laboratories. Genomic and proteomic data on cancers from patient material provides hypotheses regarding potential novel drug targets. Laboratory platforms to validate whether target modulation would provide a clinical benefit are usually highly reductionist, often using long-established cell lines growing in 2 dimensions in vitro. These models do not reflect the complexity and heterogeneity of a tumour in situ, where biochemical pathways are wired with connections to the complex tumour environment provided by the stroma.