The ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to outstanding researchers with at least seven and up to twelve years of experience after completing their PhD, and a scientific track record showing great promise.

“This ERC grant is a recognition of everybody in the laboratory as my research is very much team effort. It allows us to continue doing ground-breaking multidisciplinary research with the aim to improve treatment for cancer patients in the future.” says Louis Vermeulen.

“Previous research from my laboratory showed that bowel cancer is in fact a collection of different diseases. These so-called subtypes differ in the clinical presentation, the response to therapies and the prognosis of the patients. Our research is aimed at unravelling the molecular underpinning of these differences” he adds.

In the current project, Vermeulen and his team will focus on the subtype with the poorest disease outcome and seek to elucidate which signals drive the growth in these cancers. Although in most bowel cancers the environment is a key factor in promoting tumor growth, preliminary evidence suggests that this aggressive subtype is independent of the environment and the cancer cells found ways to mimic supporting cells. This provides a promising new target for therapies.

Marvin Tanenbaum’s research is focused on the earliest steps of cellular infection, which have remained hidden despite viruses having been studied for decades . To overcome this barrier, Tanenbaum and his team recently developed a first-in-kind imaging technology for simple positive-sense single stranded RNA (+ssRNA) viruses that transforms one’s ability to visualize early viral infection processes. In the current project the single-molecule toolbox will be expanded to gain more insights into early viral infection of the more complex group of negative-sense RNA (-ssRNA) viruses.

The focus will be on the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a -ssRNA virus which can be deadly in infants and vulnerable adults and lacks effective treatments. “We will determine how viral transcription and replication are coordinated on single viral genomic RNA molecules to optimize early viral propagation, what causes the early viral infection heterogeneity, and how heterogeneity in early viral infection impacts infection outcome. This will help us to gain a deep understanding of viral biology, which will eventually inform therapeutic interventions” says Tanenbaum.