What if you could know, within days, whether a cancer treatment will actually work for a patient? For thousands of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, that question is painfully urgent. Cytoreductive surgery combined Platinum-based chemotherapy is still the standard first-line treatment, yet for nearly half of all patients it offers little benefit. Instead, it brings heavy side effects, delays effective care, and allows the disease to return in a more aggressive form.
ERC Proof of Concept funding is helping to bridge this gap by supporting early validation work and assessing the feasibility of bringing ChromStretch closer to clinical and commercial application.
With the help of an ERC Proof of Concept grant, research led by Nitika Taneja, group leader at Erasmus MC and Oncode Investigator, is taking a crucial step beyond fundamental discovery, testing whether ChromStretch can deliver meaningful insights in real clinical sample material. By connecting cutting-edge molecular insights to clinical collaboration, this work aims to open the door to more precise treatment choices and to reaching many more patients, faster.
Reading Cancer’s Earliest Signals
At the heart of this research is a deceptively simple idea: cancer cells reveal clues about their future response to therapy almost immediately after treatment begins. In earlier fundamental work, Taneja’s team studied how cancer cells respond to chemotherapy precisely at the moment their DNA is being replicated, a particularly vulnerable phase for dividing cancer cells. Using a technology called ChromStretch, which stretches individual chromatin fibers from single cells, they discovered that subtle but reproducible changes in DNA organisation appear within minutes of chemotherapy exposure.
Those early changes, published in Nature Cell Biology, turned out to be remarkably telling. They reflect how well cancer cells cope with treatment-induced stress and correlate strongly with whether a cell survives treatment or becomes resistant.
“What fascinated us,” Taneja explains, “was that the cell already seems to ‘commit’ to a particular trajectory very early on. If we can read that commitment, we can make much better treatment choices.”
That insight formed the scientific foundation for the next step: testing whether these molecular signals could also predict treatment response in real patients.
A Crucial Step Toward Clinical Validation
Thanks to ERC funding and a collaborative translational approach that demonstrated feasibility of the assay in pilot studies. For this stage this assay has predictive value for platinum response by comparing ChromStretch signatures to known clinical outcomes. This allows for the future to rigorously validate whether the assay can reliably predict, before treatment starts, which patients will benefit from platinum chemotherapy and which will not.
Crucially, the approach aims to deliver a clear, clinically interpretable readout, one that could ultimately support treatment decision-making once validated. It is designed to eventually provide an actionable yes-or-no readout based on the dynamic state of cancer cells prior to treatment initiation. It requires only minimal patient material and delivers results within three days, fast enough to be integrated into routine clinical decision-making, once validation and confirmatory studies demonstrate effectiveness. In the future, this could help prevent patients from undergoing treatments that are unlikely to be effective, sparing them unnecessary toxicity and lost time.
The pillar of Oncode Institute: Enabling Translation Through Collaboration
This step from discovery to clinic did not happen by chance. It reflects a structured way of working in which fundamental researchers, clinicians, and translational experts are actively brought together around promising findings.
Nitika Taneja, Oncode Investigator at Oncode Institute and Erasmus MC
“By actively connecting fundamental researchers with clinicians and translational experts, promising discoveries can move beyond the lab and begin to make a real impact in clinical practice.”
This kind of ‘matchmaking’ is central to the vision of Oncode Institute: ensuring that promising science does not stall before reaching patients.
Belief, Backed by Science
ERC funding now provides the credibility and momentum to take that next step at scale. It signals trust, not only in the science, but in the researcher and the translational pathway ahead. The ultimate goal is not to create yet another test, but to change how treatment decisions are made.
“Science like this is beautiful,” Taneja reflects. “Because it allows us to understand life at its most fundamental level, and then use that understanding to help someone, quickly, when it truly matters.”
We also congratulate Sebastian Pomplun with the European Research Council (ERC) funding: a powerful recognition of scientific excellence and bold, curiosity-driven research.
