BREAKING NEWS
Unlocking
the mysteries
of digestive
cancers
By articulating the research continuum, from basic, translational to clinical research, our aim is to understand and treat metastatic digestive cancers.
Cancers arise in a specific organ where they form primary tumors. Yet, their conquest toward secondary organs, and the formation of metastases, are responsible for 90% of patients’ death. Nowadays, no effective therapy targeting the metastatic dissemination of tumor cells exist, presenting a major unmet medical need.
✓ How are cancer cells enabled with migratory properties?
✓ Do they use one or diverse strategies for their locomotion?
✓ Can we target their engine to stop the metastatic spread?
Our lab focuses on digestive cancers, with a specific interest for colorectal carcinomas representing the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Our goals are two fold:
- Understand the fundamental processes underlying the metastatic spread of cancer in order to identify actionable specific targets to prevent cancer spread.
- Provide short-term strategies to improve the treatment of patients with advanced refractory digestive cancers.
Driven by the tight collaboration between scientists and clinicians, we develop unique approaches combining cell biology methods to the study of live primary cancer specimens. This is articulated as a bidirectional workflow:
- “From bedside-to-bench”: we collect and monitor primary cancer explants from large cohorts of patients.
- “From bench-to-bedside”: we amplify and study patients’ tumors ex vivo as “organoids” or in mice as “patient-derived xenografts”.
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