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Gastroenterology and technologies for health

Objectives

Our team aims at understanding and treating human digestive cancers. Our work is organized around two main axes:

  • The first, which is very fundamental, focuses on the origin of rare neuroendocrine tumors of the small intestine, and tries to decipher why some patients exhibit hundreds of independent tumors.
  • The second aims at developing new, innovative anti-cancer molecules and transfer them to the clinic.

Projects

Digestive cancers represent a major public health problem. Our team seeks to unravel the mechanisms of their invasion and to cure them, through two lines of research.

1) Under normal conditions, enteroendocrine cells sense the contents of the intestine and release hormones to regulate gastrointestinal activity, food intake and systemic metabolism. Numerous cell subtypes that spatio-temporally regulate digestion throughout the gut have been described.
However, little is known about these cells during the formation of small intestinal neuroendocrine tumors (NETs), which have so far been considered and treated as a single pathology. Our team’s project therefore aims at understanding the formation of these neuroendocrine tumors and the development of new associated therapies.

2) The second axis of study is based on the use of a promising technology called radioimmunotherapy, already used to treat NETs in clinical settings. This project is based on an industrial chair awarded by ANR and Orano. We have recently characterized cell surface proteins that are highly specific to cancer cells, making them prime targets for therapy. Four of them, at different stages of development in terms of type of pathology, presence of a vector (antibody, peptide), etc., have been chosen for their biological properties. The ambitious challenge we have set ourselves is to address various innovative metals to tumor cells in order to destroy them. The ultimate goal is to find the best target/carrier/radiation emitter combination, in order to select one or more radiopharmaceuticals compatible with rapid clinical development in humans.

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