UPTAKE! ERC Consolidator Grant awarded to the Najumudeen Lab
Cells tightly regulate their chemical exchange with the environment to meet their metabolic demands. While intracellular metabolic pathways are well characterised, much less is known about how cells control nutrient uptake at their surface - the essential first step of metabolism carried out by transporter proteins such as solute carriers (SLCs). The European Research Council (ERC) awarded a Consolidator Grant to FIMM-EMBL Group Leader Rafa Najumudeen to investigate how SLCs spatially organise intestinal cancer metabolism using advanced spatial metabolic imaging.
Rafa Najumudeen’s research focuses on how metabolic specialisation enables stem cells and cancer cells to thrive in demanding tissue environments. In a significant stride toward understanding how tumours fuel themselves and evade treatment, Najumudeen has successfully secured an ERC Consolidator Grant for his project, 'UPTAKE: How do cells absorb nutrients? Spatially resolving nutrient uptake using intestinal cells as a paradigm'. The grant will empower his team to investigate, how intestinal stem cells and cancer-initiating cells acquire and utilise nutrients during cancer initiation and progression.
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The UPTAKE project leverages Najumudeen’s expertise in cancer, genetic engineering and spatial metabolomics. The central aim is to map the metabolic landscape of intestinal stem cells and cancer-initiating cells using high-resolution, single spatial metabolic imaging methods, to visualise nutrient uptake at cellular and subcellular scales. The team will develop scalable, next-generation mouse models designed to interrogate the function of SLC transporters. These models will make it possible to comprehensively assess how altered nutrient transport shapes cancer initiation and progression in vivo, drawing on both preclinical systems and clinical samples. Through spatial multi-omics approaches, the team will unravel how SLC-driven nutrient acquisition rewires tumour metabolism and contributes to malignancy.
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Rafa Najumudeen's success in securing this grant marks several records nationally: UPTAKE is only the second LS4 CoG grant in Finland, making Rafa the first non-european to secure a CoG in Life Sciences in Finland and the first PI of Indian origin to secure a CoG across all domains in Finland.
