Cellular and Chemical Biology (UMR3666 / U1143)

Each year, the CNRS honors men and women who have made outstanding contributions to the dynamism of the institution and to the advancement of French research. For this 2024 edition, Dr. Renata Basto, head of the Biology of Centrosomes and Genetic Instability team, and Dr. Raphaël Rodriguez, head of the Chemical Biology team, are the proud winners of the CNRS Silver Medal.

Dr. Raphaël Rodriguez, head of the Chemical Biology team (CNRS UMR3666 / Inserm U1143), has been named winner of the 2023 Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences. This award recognizes his work on the design of small molecules to dissect cellular processes related to cancer, inflammation and aging.

The result of solving a series of technological challenges, Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) has revolutionized the work of the scientific community. Dr Raphael Rodriguez, head of the Chemical Biology team (CNRS UMR3666 / Inserm U1143) at Institut Curie tells the genesis in an article published in Nature Biotechnology on October 16th.

For the 1st time, researchers from Institut Curie, the CNRS and Inserm have uncovered a previously unknown chain of biochemical reactions. This chain involves copper and leads to metabolic and epigenetic alterations that activate inflammation and tumorigenesis. But there is more; the research team developed a “drug prototype” capable of mitigating both the mechanisms of inflammation and the processes potentially involved in metastatic spread. These results were published in the journal Nature on April 26, 2023.

A membrane receptor is like a lock, a ligand is like a key and when one binds to the other, cell activity is triggered. Although this relatively simple pattern often works, a team at Institut Curie has just revealed in Nature Cell Biology that it is not always as simple as that: for the JAK-STAT signaling pathway, vital in several pathologies, it all happens in the endosome.