Céline Delloye-Bourgeois winner of the 2023 ERC Starting Grant program

The European Research Council (ERC) has just announced the list of recipients of its 2023 Starting Grant program. Céline Delloye-Bourgeois, who heads the “KidsCan – Cancer Neuroscience and Metastasis in Pediatric Malignancies” team at CRCL, is one of the winners of this prestigious program.

The project, funded up to €1.5M over 5 years, is entitled CANEUTREAT: Decrypting neuro-cancer crosstalk in pediatric cancers of the peripheral nervous system.

A new field of investigation in oncology has emerged in recent years: cancer neuroscience, defined by a multiplicity of dialogues between tumor and nerve cells. Surprisingly, these interactions appear to be particularly active in the paediatric population, and involve highly aggressive brain cancers. What if the developing nervous system represents a particular vulnerability in pediatric oncology? What about tumors that develop in peripheral nervous tissue, such as neuroblastoma, an aggressive, highly metastatic cancer emblematic of the young child? Can these dialogues be exploited to design new therapeutic approaches? By using and combining state-of-the-art tools, the CANEUTREAT project aims to decipher the anatomical, molecular and functional bases of neuro-cancer interactions in metastatic neuroblastoma, and to test the possibility of exploiting these dialogues to design new therapeutic approaches.

More generally, the research carried out by Céline Delloye-Bourgeois and her team aims to determine the impact of embryonic development mechanisms on the tumoral and metastatic process of aggressive childhood cancers. More information on the team’s dedicated page.