Cancer and chemotherapy : NUMEV Flagship Project GEM bearing fruits

Today onWorld Cancer Day, we highlight the work ofEric Rivals and his team at LIRMM. In a large collaborative study published on January 10 in Nature Communications,researchers have identified a mechanism of drug-resistance when using 5-FU, the most commonly used chemotherapy drug in oncology.

Among all the participating teams, in Montpellier the study involved Julie Ripoll, postdoctoral fellow and engineer in the MAB team (Methods and Algorithms for Bioinformatics) atLIRMM, as well as the team of Alexandre David and Julie Pannequin, from the « Physiology and Cancer » department of theIGF.

This multidisciplinary work, at the crossroads of computer science, bioinformatics and biology, was supported by the LabEx NUMEV through the Flagship Project GEM (Gene Expression Modelling, 2016-2020).

For more information on this topic:

• Therizols, G., Bash-Imam, Z., Panthu, B. et al.Alteration of ribosome function upon 5-fluorouracil treatment favors cancer cell drug tolerance.Nat Commun 13, 173 (2022)
• Article in regional newspaper « Midi Libre » – in French (02/02/2022)
• Inserm press release – in French (02/02/2022)