INESC-ID is a partner in PRECISE, a new pan-European initiative to predict, rather than simply catalogue, cancer vulnerabilities, formally launched today with the publication of its scientific vision in a commentary in Nature Genetics.

Cancer cells often depend on specific genes or pathways to survive, creating vulnerabilities that can be therapeutically targeted. Existing dependency maps remain largely descriptive, offering limited insight into why these vulnerabilities arise or how they might behave in untested settings. PRECISE, coordinated by Francesco Iorio (Human Technopole) and Mathew Garnett (Wellcome Sanger Institute), aims out to change that, bringing together more than 30 research groups and 20 institutions across nine European countries.

INESC-ID’s contribution to PRECISE is led by Emanuel Gonçalves, INESC-ID researcher associated with our institute’s Life and Health Technology thematic line, whose work focuses on AI/ML approaches to functional genetic screens. Together with the other PRECISE partners, INESC-ID is helping shape the experimental and computational foundations of this new European framework for predictive cancer functional genomics.

“Within PRECISE, INESC-ID has the opportunity to develop AI/ML models to explore the vast space of potential combinatorial treatments and learn from these to iteratively help design more informative experiments that in turn further improve our predictive models,” says Emanuel Gonçalves.

“This is key for future developments to explore novel, effective and precise cancer treatments.”

A distinctive feature of PRECISE is its iterative prediction-validation workflow: computational models help design new experiments, and the resulting data refine those same models, a loop expected to uncover generalisable biological rules for cancer vulnerabilities, including in untested contexts. The consortium is also built around open science principles, with shared experimental standards and FAIR data practices designed to make its outputs reusable across the research community.

Read the commentary in Nature Genetics.

Learn more on the PRECISE web portal.

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