Background:
The development of new approaches to treating disease will revolutionise health care in the coming decade. Treatment of cancers will increasingly rely on targeted molecules rather than cytotoxic drugs. Manipulation of stem cells for cell and tissue replacement therapies holds great promise for treatment of degenerative disease and injury. Both approaches depend critically on detailed knowledge of the molecular and cellular events governing normal differentiation of the target organs and tissues. This knowledge provides the basis for organ and tissue engineering.

Many important diseases affect organ systems (such as heart, vascular system, blood, kidneys, skeleton, and musculature) deriving substantially or exclusively from mesodermal cells. Heart failure and strokes resulting from atherosclerosis, kidney failure, muscular dystrophy, osteoporosis, tumours and leukaemia are caused either by defects in development of these mesoderm containing organ systems or in their function, frequently as a consequence of ageing. Together, these diseases represent principal obstacles to reaching a healthy old age.

This network will elucidate molecular and cellular processes underlying specification and differentiation of mesodermally derived organ systems. We integrate developmental genetics and experimental embryology with modern cell biology and genome scale analysis. These new technologies will enable us to identify genes which function in building a specific organ or in a particular aspect of embryogenesis. A major revelation of developmental biology has been the extent to which molecular strategies are redeployed, even during regeneration. Thus this information is the basic knowledge required for organ and tissue engineering. It is, however, a task which will far exceed the capacity or expertise of any one research group, and which requires the complementary advantages of different vertebrate and invertebrate systems and the combination of multidisciplinary skills, necessitating collaboration. We integrate 25 leading European groups in 12 renowned centres of excellence into the world's leading network for investigating the development and disease of mesodermal organ systems. Each of our major groups is a world leader in investigating a specific aspect of the development of mesoderm or a key mesodermal organ system or in applying a key genomic technique.