The BRIC unit welcomes Gautier Follain for a seminar open to the scientific community.

Gautier Follain, PhD

Shared postdoctoral researcher between the laboratories of Pr. Johanna Ivaska (University of Turku) Dr. Guillaume Jacquemet (Åbo akademi), both located in Turku (Finland).

Docent at the University of Turku, Field of application: Biophysics of cancer.

Dissecting the intravascular adhesion and extravasation of Pancreatic Ductal AdenoCarcinoma.

📆 Tuesday, September 9 11 a.m.

📌 BBS conference room, 2 rue Dr Hoffmann Martinot, Bordeaux

Abstract.

Solid tumor progression is a complex succession of events happening in different spaces and times in the body, ultimately leading to the formation of life-threatening metastases. To colonize distant organs, cancer cells are exploiting the circulatory networks as natural paths before stopping in small vessels and crossing the endothelial barrier.

My current research focuses on the steps of intravascular adhesion and extravasation (crossing of the vessel border) of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) cell lines. My main objectives are to decipher the mechanisms allowing the cells to break the endothelial barrier, in an attempt to identify key factors and actors during the process. I work with microfluidic models to better reproduce the physiologic conditions of perfused vessels, zebrafish embryos which are transparent and very rapidly develop a complex vascular system and murine models. All three are coupled with quantitative and high-resolution live imaging and to single cell characterization approaches (scRNAseq,mass cytometry,…).

My ongoing results support the idea that heterogeneity of cancer, even among laboratory cell lines, is driving different adhesion/extravasation routes that are dramatically understudied. My talk will give an overview of my postdoc projects. 1. FlowVision, our deep-learning based image analysis framework, allowing the dissection of the arrest to stabilisation of circulating PDAC and immune cells (Follain et al. BioRxiv 2024). 2. An unbiased enrichment-based screening for key actors of the intravascular adhesion step. 3. The discovery of a novel extravasation route used by PDAC cells.

Bio.

I did a PhD in life science in the lab. of Dr. Jacky Goetz (Strasbourg). I studied the role of blood flow forces on arrest, adhesion and extravasation of circulating breast/mammary cells, using multiple imaging modalities, mostly applied to microfluidics and zebrafish embryos. I described endothelial remodeling around arrested tumor cells as an extravasation mechanism of cancer cells (Follain et al. Dev cell 2018). Our works demonstrated that not only size exclusion but also shear forces are biophysic parameters driving the metastatic spreading (Follain et al. NRC 2020).
I moved to Turku as a shared postdoc between the well established Cell adhesion lab of J. Ivaska, expert in integrin biology, and the newly born lab of G. Jacquemet focusing on cellular protrusion and cell migration. I used similar models to study the metastatic cascade of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. I added to my skill set deep-learning based image analysis (Follain et al. BioRxiv 2024), imaging techniques, murine models and more.

I am now looking for the next step of my career in France..!