Cambridge handed key role in €40m EU epigenetics collaboration
Cambridge has emerged as one of the key players in a €40m (£35m) international collaborative project to decipher the epigenome, work that could lead to massive advances in the treatment of a wide range of human diseases.
Forty-one research institutes, including five from the Cambridge biotech cluster alone, will work over four years on the project dubbed Blueprint, with €30m provided by the European Commission and another €10m from collaborators in an effort to unravel how the epigenome influences health and disease.
Epigenetics can help explain how our genes can be influenced by external forces, when our environment contributes to switching genes on and off. The Babraham Institute, which is participating in Blueprint, says if we think of the genome as the body's 'building blocks', it is the epigenome that defines how the building blocks actually construct living things. One example would be the small differences that exist between genetically identical twins
Faulty epigenetic regulation is known to be implicated in diseases like cancer and cardiovascular disease as well as conditions like diabetes and obesity.
"It is clear that our susceptibility to disease can only be partially explained by genes alone and epigenetics is emerging as an important research area that is bringing insight to many adult conditions like heart disease, diabetes, cancer and autoimmune disorders," said Professor Wolf Reik, associate director at the Babraham Institute and Professor of Epigenetics at the University of Cambridge.
"The purpose of project Blueprint is to determine the properties and functions of epigenomes in development and disease."
Blueprint will contribute to the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC) with UK participation coming from its leading biotech funders, the Medical Research Council (MRC) the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK.
As well as the Babraham Institute, the Cambridge participants include Cambridge University, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the European Bioinformatics Institute and new Babraham-based arrival, Oxford Nanopore.
