Christoph Bock receives EP PerMed grant for personalized treatment in children
CeMM PI Christoph Bock has been awarded funding through the European Partnership for Personalised Medicine (EP PerMed) under the 2025 Joint Transnational Call. His three-year project, titled “PharmocogenOmics for minimized Risk and better Efficacy in Children on high-dose Steroid Treatment (PhORECaST)”, focuses on improving the use of high-dose glucocorticoids, which remain a cornerstone therapy for acute immune-mediated diseases in children but are associated with substantial variability in treatment response and risk of adverse effects.
Paediatric immune-mediated diseases are on the rise worldwide, often affecting children at increasingly younger ages and posing significant challenges for long-term care. High-dose glucocorticoids (GC) remain a mainstay of treatment due to their rapid and potent anti-inflammatory effects. Yet, their use is still largely guided by experience rather than evidence: optimal dosing strategies are unclear, and clinicians lack reliable tools to predict which patients will benefit—or suffer harmful side effects. At the same time, the epigenetic, metabolic, and immunological consequences of high-dose GC therapy in children remain insufficiently understood.
PhORECaST aims to address this gap by combining clinical data with multi-omics technologies, including genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. By integrating these data layers, the consortium seeks to identify molecular signatures that predict therapeutic response and toxicity, enabling more precise and evidence-based treatment strategies.
At CeMM, Christoph Bock and his team will lead the epigenomic analyses of patient samples, using methods such as ATAC-seq to investigate how glucocorticoid treatment affects gene regulation in immune cells. These insights will contribute to a systems-level understanding of treatment response and support the development of predictive models for clinical decision-making.
The project brings together leading institutions from across Europe, including partners in Germany, Finland, Sweden, Luxembourg, and the Czech Republic. This multidisciplinary collaboration combines expertise in clinical paediatrics, systems biology, bioinformatics, and ethical research, with a strong focus on translating findings into clinical practice.
By developing biomarker-driven approaches to guide glucocorticoid therapy, PhORECaST aims to reduce treatment-related toxicity, improve patient outcomes, and lay the foundation for personalized medicine in paediatric inflammatory diseases.
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