The job consists in developing research projects with students of Ecole Polytechnique, who would be hosted in the research lab during the academic year. The goal is to teach them biology through research. The instructor should teach them how to plan, design and perform experiments. Reagents for the project are funded by a budget line that is independent from the general resources of the research team. In addition, the instructor should be motivated to help students to mature their scientific thinking, by reading research papers, preparing presentations and participating in the strategy of publication. The goal is to publish studies with students to promote their future education. The instructor is expected to be creative in designing original research projects that take full advantage of hosting many students in the lab during the academic year (possibility of parallelizing the work, transmission of the work from a student generation to the next one).
Project : Personalized Reconstitution of the Tumoral Process
The overall theme is to use mutations found in patients to identify and validate novel cancer genes. To this end, potential novel oncogenes will be expressed in untransformed cell lines and potential novel tumor suppressor genes will be invalidated using CRISPR mediated knock-outs. To connect the work with the rest of the research team, we will focus on breast cancer and melanoma, where the RAC1-WAVE-Arp2/3 pathway is particularly important.
The project consists in predicting driver mutations from all the mutations found in a single tumor from a single patient. 10 patients with advanced breast cancers with either single cell or collective invasion were selected and their tumors have been sequenced in collaboration with national reference cancer centers of Russia, in Moscow and in Tomsk in Siberia, through an International Associated Laboratory of CNRS. The predicted driver mutations will be sequentially reintroduced in the genome of an untransformed cell line in order to reconstitute the stepwise transformation process that is responsible for the development of this particular tumor. Samples from each patient are available to validate future in vitro findings.
