16 Nov Welcome to Hélène Guillorit!

The MIRCADE team is delighted to welcome Dr Hélène Guillorit as a post-doctoral fellow, who arrived on November 1 for a contract of at least 14 months.

After completing her pharmacy studies in Poitiers, Hélène wrote her biology thesis in Montpellier on the subject of cancer stem cells in colon cancer. She then worked for a year in New York, USA, as a researcher in a small company developing drugs for Parkinson’s disease. Having returned to France a few months ago, she decided to return to her field of expertise, cancer.

Supervised by Dr Christophe Grosset, her project within the MIRCADE team focuses on identifying new treatments for hepatoblastoma and repositioning drugs already used clinically to treat other cancers. Prior to her arrival on the team, this work, initiated by Dr Marina Simon Coma, had identified a dozen anticancer molecules effective against hepatoblastoma cells from the 330 tested. The next stage of the project aims to confirm the ability of these molecules to eradicate hepatoblastoma tumor cells, and to combine the most interesting ones for maximum efficacy. The most promising combinations will be tested in vivo in a mouse model of hepatoblastoma to determine their ability to eliminate tumor cells in a whole animal, and their toxicity. This study could lead to the development of new therapeutic solutions for the treatment of hepatoblastoma, and in particular address the issues of relapse and chemoresistance.