Rare neurodevelopmental disorders of the Ras pathway continue to evade effective treatment. The EURAS consortium has been awarded ~8 million euros from the Health Cluster of the Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme to develop new effective therapies and establish a framework for early, accurate diagnosis of neurological symptoms in a specific group of RASopathies (cardio-facio-cutaneous syndrome, Costello syndrome and SYNGAP1-related encephalopathy).
The consortium will identify disease signatures, develop new and use existing disease models, identify and validate new therapeutic approaches and brain delivery systems and, with patient organisations from 13 countries, establish a patient registry for stratification and evaluation of therapeutic approaches. In this project, the research group of Michael Courtney at Turku Bioscience, University of Turku, will identify dynamic neuronal response phenotypes that are specific to each disease studied. The most suitable phenotypic signatures then be used as readouts for drug repurposing screens using the intrastructure of the Turku Screening Unit, which is member of the Drug Discovery and Chemical Biology platform of Biocentre Finland and a partner site of EU-Openscreen. The hits identified by the screens will be validated in multiple alternative models for each rasopathy available to the consortium, and provided to the remaining consortium partners for further proof-of-concept validation. More details about the consortium as a whole can be found here.

A position is available on this project, application deadline 19 June 2023. The description and application links can be found here or job ID 14916 from here