Team: Bart Westerman, Matthijs Verhage, Jan Koster en Mark Verheijen

Understanding how different cell types interact in complex biological systems is a key aspect of both oncology and brain disease research. For instance, interactions of neurons with glioma cells correlate to poor patient survival and we have shown that these cellular interactions progressively increase during tumor progression. Emerging  new technologies now allow us to study such interactions much more systematically than ever before and provide unique new opportunities to better understand disease and design new intervention strategies. This project aims to establish this new technology at Adore using unique assets already developed in our labs, and apply it in a proof-of-concept study to establish (A) new multi-cell type disease modeling and (B) CRISPR screening for new therapeutic targets involved in neuron-tumor and (C) glia-tumor interactions (Fig 1). Once established, future oncology and neuroscience projects in Adore will benefit equally from this new technology, including standardized array screen formats, automated live cell microscopy and analysis pipelines, and shared CRISPR libraries.