We are very proud to be part of the European Project INTERCEPT-MDS, a highly competitive international training network (ITN) that seeks to advance cancer research and have a high impact on future generations of researchers. In this article, you can learn more about ITNs in general and this initiative in particular.
What is an ITN?
An ITN is a training and research network funded by the European Union. Each ITN funds and hosts a certain amount of Ph.D. students from around the world. The program focuses on creating an immersive, high-performance training experience for each Early Stage Researcher (ESR).
The selected students will be part of research projects in institutions or companies, participating in a network of events, internships, and high-value work experiences.
It is also an initiative that brings together the most prestigious institutions in the European Union. Each project might also include industrial beneficiaries who comply with the EU standards of quality in training and research. More details here.
What is the Intercept-MDS project about:
Intercept-MDS was created with the primary objective of training EU’s next-generation researchers and it hosts now 12 PhD. students. The shared research objectives could be summarized as follows:
- Advance cancer research to detect myeloid disease cells (blood-forming cells in the bone marrow) in an early stage and detect potential points for an interception.
- Develop novel preclinical models for myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), a type of cancer where blood-forming cells in the bone marrow become abnormal
- Develop new data analysis methods for Single-Cell Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data.
What is the role of BioBam?
BioBam provides bioinformatics know-how to the network and hosts one of the 12 students: Priyansh Srivastava. Priyansh holds a Masters’s in Computational Genomics from the University of Galway, Ireland, and studied Bioinformatics in New Deli, India. He now started his industrial doctorate at BioBam in collaboration with the research laboratory of Dr. Ana Conesa (I2SysBio, CSIC) and the academic support of the University of Valencia.
The initial goal of his research is focused on the functional interpretation of cell states at single-cell resolution. In this context, Priyansh will be developing novel methods for the advanced pathway analysis of complex single-cell data. Results will be published and made available to the scientific community and might become part of OmicsBox’s Single Cell Data Analysis Module, one of BioBam’s bioinformatics solutions.
See also: Cordis Europa Programme.
