Evolutionary Medical Genomics Researchers

EvoMG-DN is a European Doctoral Network funded by the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), composed of 14 beneficiaries and associated partners from both academic and non-academic sectors.

THE PROJECT

Medical Genomics is an emerging field at the intersection of evolutionary biology andgenomic medicine.

It explores how evolutionary processes—acting over millions of years on hosts,pathogens, and even cancer cells—shape disease susceptibility, therapeutic resistance, and health outcomes.​The EvoMG-DN project harnesses this framework to address key biomedical challenges in ageing, cancer, and infectious diseases. By integrating genomics, machine learning, and mathematical modelling, it aims to understand how genetic diversity and evolutionary history influence disease mechanisms and improve the design of evolution-informed therapies.

SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL OBJECTIVES

EvoMG-DN will generate novel insights and tools at the interface of evolutionary biology and medicine through 15 doctoral research projects structured around three core disease areas: ageing, cancer, and infectious diseases.

The scientific and technical objectives of the network are to model evolutionary mechanisms underlying disease progression and treatment resistance using data-driven and theoretical approaches, to develop AI and machine learning tools tailored to predict genomic evolution in clinical and ecological contexts, to investigate inter-individual and inter-species genomic variation using high-throughput sequencing and comparative genomics, to build statistical and mathematical frameworks that capture evolutionary dynamics in pathogens, somatic cells, and immune systems, to design integrative pipelines that combine multi-omics data, phenotypic information, and environmental variables to reveal actionable insights, and to produce evolution-informed therapeutic strategies through translational collaboration with clinical and industrial partners. Each objective is addressed through a co-designed network of individual projects, secondments, and shared methodologies, enabling not only scientific advancement but also the integration of complementary approaches from evolutionary biology and medical genomics.

WORK PACKAGES

Comprising three scientific work packages that cover the main research program, to which all 15 individual research projects contribute:​