The word from the Director

Presentation of the Unit by Pr. Jean-Philippe Merlio

  • 10/04/2017

Join the band !

Thanks to the input of our former conductor Jean Rosenbaum, a skillful scientist and cello player, three independent teams decided in 2015 to merge into a community inspired by a common interest in human translational research. Each team or section has a longstanding experience in its own domain but shares with the others a common interest in cancer cell biology and a willingness to find new biomarkers and targets of clinical relevance.

We are all using experimental approaches in mice or cancer cell line models to characterize cancer cell hallmarks in three major cancer types, liver carcinoma, gastric cancer linked to Helicobacter infection and cutaneous lymphoma, each of them being composed of different entities. Shared interests are for example cancer cell migration, microenvironment interaction, cancer cell stemness and signaling pathways.

Clinicians, pathologists, bacteriologists and geneticists of the University Hospital of Bordeaux are members of the teams that permits access to human samples, the setup of correlative clinico-pathological studies, clinical trials and patients’ derived experimental models. We have set up at the hospital side common platforms including the cancer biobank and the Helicobacter Reference Centre.

At the INSERM research Unit side, our laboratory provides all facilities for molecular biology including quantitative PCR, cell culture, cell biology including a fully automated cell tracking system, imaging, histopathology as we host the TransBiomed Histological Platform. Thanks to the TransBiomed federation, we also have access to common facilities such as flow cytometry, lentiviral production… Members of the team are also developing an innovative proteomic facility called Oncoprot.

Each week an interactive team seminar is given in alternance with students’ presentation completing the program of TransBiomed Seminars and the life of each team which has been individually patented as Research Team by INSERM on January 1, 2016.

Therefore, if you have an interest in collaborating with us or joining one of the research teams, we commonly hope that we fill find together the right tempo and approach for performing fruitful scientific projects.

Jean-Philippe Merlio, MD, PhD, BaRITOn director.