Building on cancer dependency maps
PRECISE (Predictive Relationships Explaining Cancer Genetic Interactions and Synthetic Essentiality) is a pan-European initiative that aims to move cancer research beyond cataloguing cancer vulnerabilities and towards predicting them before they are experimentally tested.
PRECISE brings together over 30 research groups from more than 20 institutes across nine European countries, including experts from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Human Technopole.
Their goals and scientific vision have been published today (10 July) in Nature Genetics, marking the formal launch of this consortium and the beginning of a coordinated European effort to redefine how cancer vulnerabilities are discovered, understood, and ultimately translated into precision therapies.
Despite substantial advances in precision oncology, predicting how cancer evolves and identifying therapeutic vulnerabilities remain significant challenges. Cancer cells often depend on specific genes or molecular pathways to survive or proliferate, creating vulnerabilities that can be therapeutically exploited. Large-scale experimental screens have generated cancer dependency maps that identify many such vulnerabilities and have significantly advanced the discovery of new therapeutic targets. However, these maps remain largely descriptive, providing limited insight into the mechanisms underlying them, their evolution under therapeutic pressure, or their behaviour across different biological contexts.
To address these limitations, PRECISE is the first coordinated European effort to develop predictive models of cancer vulnerabilities at this scale. By combining biology with advanced molecular profiling, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), the PRECISE consortium aims to determine where cancer vulnerabilities occur, but also why they arise and how they can be anticipated in previously untested settings. This integrated approach has the potential to accelerate the discovery of therapeutic targets and extend the benefits of precision oncology to patients whose tumours currently lack actionable treatment options.
A distinctive feature of PRECISE is its iterative prediction-validation workflow. Rather than simply analysing existing data, computational models guide the design of new experiments by prioritising the most informative genomic changes to test in the laboratory. The resulting new data are then used to refine the models, creating a continuous feedback loop that progressively improves predictive performance. Through these iterative prediction-validation cycles, PRECISE aims to learn generalisable biological rules that explain and predict cancer vulnerabilities across diverse tumour types and biological contexts, including settings that have never been experimentally investigated.
PRECISE is also committed to open science. The consortium promotes common experimental standards, interoperable analytical pipelines, and FAIR data principles to ensure that datasets and computational tools can be shared, integrated, and reused across the international research community.
“Can we stay one step ahead of cancer by anticipating its next moves? That is precisely the ambition of PRECISE: to help transform oncology from a reactive discipline into a predictive one.”
Dr Andrea Sottoriva, member of PRECISE at Human Technopole
“Cancer biology is entering a predictive era. PRECISE brings together Europe’s leading expertise in functional genomics, AI, and computational biology to move beyond describing cancer vulnerabilities towards anticipating them. Our ambition is to develop generalisable models that can guide experiments, accelerate therapeutic discovery, and ultimately extend the reach of precision oncology.”
Dr Francesco Iorio, co-first author of this article at Human Technopole
“Everything we know about cancer vulnerabilities to this point has given us the strong foundations needed to take this next transformative step in cancer research. PRECISE aims to move away from describing cancer vulnerabilities to understanding how they work and evolve, helping find new ways to target them. Being able to accurately predict cancer’s next step could have a catalytic effect on science, something that should be openly shared and available to the entire research community, so we can work together to find new ways to treat cancer.”
Dr Mathew Garnett, co-first author of the article at the Wellcome Sanger Institute
More information
Further information about the consortium, its principle, and its goals is available on the PRECISE web portal.
Publication:
F. Iorio, M.J. Garnett, P. Beltrao, et al. (2026) ‘PRECISE as a European initiative for cancer-vulnerability mapping and prediction’. Nature Genetics. DOI: 10.1038/s41588-026-02658-z
Acknowledgements:
A full list of PRECISE consortium members and any competing interests can be found on the publication.
