Team Leader
CENTRE LEON BERARD AND CANCER RESEARCH CENTER OF LYON (INSERM U1052-CNRS5286), France
I have started my molecular biologist career as a PhD student in the renowned laboratory of Jean-Marc Egly at the Institute of genetics and of cellular and molecular biology (IGBMC, Illkirch, France), where I studied TFIIH, an essential basic transcription factor, deciphering the role of some of its numerous subunits. During the summer 2000, I moved to the Institut Curie in Paris joining the lab of Olivier Delattre. For 16 years, first as a post-doc then as a permanent researcher, I studied the biology of Ewing sarcoma cells, revealing its mesenchymal stem cell origin, demonstrating the mechanisms of the induction of the IGF pathway, discovering the peculiar DNA binding sites of its pathognomonic fusion protein EWSR1::FLI1 or identifying secondary mutations leading to a more aggressive disease. With the advent of next generation sequencing, and trying to identify the oncogenic driver of some variant Ewing sarcomas, we discovered the BCOR::CCNB3 bone sarcomas, the EWSR1::TFCP2 rhabdomyosarcomas or the SMARCA4-deficient undifferentiated thoracic tumors. These discoveries increased my interest in unclassified sarcomas and especially in unclassified small round cell sarcomas. In 2015 I was appointed INSERM research director and moved the next year to the Cancer Research Center of Lyon hosted by the Léon Bérard comprehensive cancer center, where I first Ied the “Biology of rare sarcomas” group and since 2021 the “Genetics, epigenetics and biology of sarcomas” team. The main interest of my team is to decipher the function(s) of rare fusion transcript found in sarcomas, such as YWHAEA::NUTM2B or CIC::DUX4.
