The PRECISE European initiative for cancer-vulnerability mapping and prediction

PRECISE is a European initiative to move cancer research beyond descriptive atlases toward predictive, mechanistically informed models of tumor vulnerability. By integrating patient cohorts, disease-relevant model systems, perturbation biology, multimodal profiling and artificial intelligence-driven inference, the PRECISE consortium aims to learn generalizable and predictive rules that govern genetic dependencies and synthetic lethality.

Understanding and exploiting cancer vulnerabilities are central challenges in oncology. The inter- and intra-tumoral heterogeneity of cancer creates an enormous multidimensional landscape of genetic, epigenetic, cellular and microenvironmental states, many of which evolve dynamically during disease progression and treatment. Consequently, deriving clinically actionable precision-oncology strategies requires coordinated efforts at scale. Over the past decade, large-scale pharmacological and genetic perturbation screens in diverse cancer models have enabled systematic mapping of cancer dependencies linked to specific molecular contexts. This has created foundational cancer-dependency maps for the functional interpretation of tumor genomes and the identification of therapeutic targets.