Made up of 14 members—10 academic research groups, 3 SMEs and 1 big pharma—from 7 different member states, EPITRON is funded by the European Union under the 6th Framework Programme (LSHC-CT-2005-518417).

The EPITRON consortium seeks to define and validate the concept of ‘epigenetic cancer treatment’. This will be accomplished by: i) defining the epigenetic alterations by which cancer cells deviate from their normal counterparts, ii) identifying novel therapeutic targets and treatment paradigms from these analyses in order to iii) generate novel ‘epi-drugs’ and validate them in suitable model systems.

The term ‘epigenetic’ describes the functional impact of covalent post-transcriptional modifications on chromatin. Chromatin is a proteinaceous complex composed of histones and associated DNA that is organized in multiple structural levels resulting in an enormous condensation of the DNA helix (see figure 1).

Whereas there is one major type of DNA modification, there is a large number of interdependent histone modifications.
The major type of DNA modification is the methylation at cytosines, which does not affect the DNA sequence. On the other hand, histones are the target of multiple covalent modifications such as methylation, phosphorylation, acetylation or ubiquitination (see figure 2).
Combinations of these are thought to contribute in various ways to chromatin organization and to have a normal signalling function in gene expression as they are believed to correspond to “docking stations” of gene regulatory factors. But inappropriate ‘epigenetic’ states can lead to disease, including cancer.