Latest funding successes

April 12, 2026

Since starting in Helsinki in 2025, the Kuijjer group has received funding from various funding sources, which are listed below. We are looking forward to starting these projects!

We received 800k EUR from the Jane & Aatos Erkko Foundation for the project "NETMET: Modeling gene regulation at the patient and cell level to understand cancer aggressiveness and improve patient stratification." This is a four year project starting in September 2026. NETMET aims to map the landscape of regulatory drivers of cancer aggressiveness by developing computational tools to model, analyze, and integrate gene regulatory rewiring using multi-omics data at high resolution. Specifically, we will focus on (i) designing biologically-informed integrative deep learning methods to stratify cancer patients based on regulatory features, (ii) developing network science methods to map gene regulation at single-cell and spatial resolution, and (iii) building interpretable models that link regulatory mechanisms to cancer aggressiveness, including metastasis development, treatment resistance, and poor survival. We will apply these tools to large public and in-house cancer datasets to better understand aggressive cancer behavior, identify regulatory drivers of disease progression, and develop patient-specific predictors of drug response and survival to inform future treatment strategies, thereby advancing precision oncology.

We received 100k EUR from the Finnish Cancer Foundation for the project "Towards clinical applications of personalized gene regulatory network models." This is a two year project that started in January 2026. The project aims to move patient-specific gene regulatory networks closer to clinical applications through developing approaches that model intra-tumor heterogeneity of regulatory mechanisms in bulk tumor data, connecting insights from high-resolution molecular data with clinical outcomes, and translating these findings into clinically actionable infomation.

Finally, we received 225k EUR from Sigrid Jusélius Foundation for the project "Regulary determinants of metastatic progression in high-grade serous ovarian cancer." This is a three year project that will start in May 2026. Here, we will specifically focus on defining patient-specific regulatory heterogeneity in primary ovarian cancer and identifing regulatory rewiring that drives metastatic progression. We will develop new cancer data science analyses approaches to characterize regulatory mechanisms modulated by therapeutic pressure and evaluate how these programs relate to therapy response.