I am a french researcher affiliated to the Cancer Research Center of Toulouse, Inserm UMR 1037, and I am visiting Dr Chiarle’s laboratory in the context of a collaborative project on the therapeutic modulation and use of autophagy to improve the therapies of ALK oncogene-associated cancers. I achieved my research formation in the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis (France), then I performed my PhD in Toulouse University (France) and, after post-doctoral trainings in Brussels (Belgium) and Stanford (USA), I was recruited as a research associate at the Inserm institute in 2008.
My research interests are to understand tumor progression and resistance to therapies. My past work to understand ALK+ALCL disease development and maintenance include the generation of mouse models allowing the conditional expression of the NPM-ALK or TPM3-ALK expression in the lymphoid lineage. These models have then been used to demonstrate in vivo the addiction of these tumors to the ALK oncogene and to highlight the importance of angiogenesis and VEGF in tumor progression. In 2011, I obtained a young researcher ANR grant, which allowed me to develop a new project on the role of autophagy in ALK+ ALCL. I demonstrated the cytoprotective function of autophagy upon ALK-targeted therapy and, in the continuity of this work, I studied the post-transcriptional regulation of autophagy (through miRNA) upon Crizotinib treatment. Recently, and in collaboration with Dr Chiarle, I focused my research on the potential use of autophagy and ALK-tumor derived autophagosomal-vaccine as a new immunotherapeutic approach to fight ALK+ ALCL.