photographist

"I set up my laboratory at the CEA thanks to obtaining funding for my research projects – funding from the ANR (French National Research Agency) and the ARC (cancer research foundation) initially, followed by European funding. With this I was able to recruit employees to develop experiments. We are assessed yearly by the CEA and every four years by the AERES (the agency which controls research and higher education in France), which validates the laboratory's existence or not. A laboratory only exists if its research is funded; whether it can last or not depends on obtaining external funding – public or private, national or international. At the CEA, some laboratories are partly funded by EDF and Areva, notably for radiobiology. L'Oréal also funds laboratories which work on skin cells. They study systems to make skin grafts reconstituted in vitro, to treat severe burns, for example.

I am interested in DNA damage which creates genetic instability. I use the organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or baker's yeast, which has a highly controllable genetic organisation and which allows DNA breakages to be induced in a targeted way, and then the effect the different disruptors have on their repair to be studied. The CEA has set up a biology department, of which one mission is to study the effects of different energies on living organisms. Research carried out in my laboratory is therefore mainly cognitive-oriented. However, the DNA repair mechanisms, and in general the mechanisms which control stability of the genome, are largely conserved from yeast to human. The mechanisms we study and the results of our research can provide targets for therapeutic purposes, notably secondary cancers related to irradiation."

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