Genomics and Development of Childhood Cancers

Childhood cancer is the most common disease-related cause of mortality in children. Adult and childhood cancers are thought to arise from distinct mechanisms. Pediatric cancers arise from a dysregulation of the normal development thus resulting in a cell differentiation blockade. By hijacking these processes from normal development, cancer cells have time to develop and grow as pre-cancerous lesions then developing into a malignant tumor.

One of the main goals of our team is to identify these mechanisms in order to resolve the spatio-temporal origins of pediatric brain tumors using single-cell omics technologies and genome-wide data analyses. In addition, we investigate the transcriptional and post-transcriptional programs of the normal development that are hijacked by cancer cells in order to exploit these vulnerabilities and to propose new therapeutic strategies for these deadly cancers. We use computational biology and genomics to understand what are the normal differentiation programs driving cell differentiation and use this knowledge to better understand the mechanisms that are hijacked by cancer cells in children. Our main strengths are cancer biology, computational biology and genomics.

Spontaneous applications are welcome for a bioinformatics project, please contact me at olivier.saulnier@curie.fr