PhD. (Human Genetics), McGill University, Montreal, Canada, 2013
BSc. (Bioinformatics), Institut National des Sciences Appliquees, Lyon, France, 2007
Thoracic radiotherapy, a common treatment for patients with lung, breast or esophageal cancers leads to pulmonary side-effects in ~30% of the patients. These adverse reactions are either alveolitis, characterized by excessive inflammation or pulmonary fibrosis which consists of collagen deposition in the lungs. Alveolitis is treatable with corticosteroids, but there is no known cure for fibrosis.
Many factors dictate the onset of fibrosis, and among them is the patient’s genetic susceptibility. Prior knowledge before radiation administration of the patients prone to fibrosis development would lead to better cancer treatments.
Given that mouse and human responses to radiation are very similar, we make use of a murine model to detect genetic variants predisposing certain mouse strains to the development of pulmonary fibrosis. We integrate bioinformatic approaches such as transcriptome analyses of fibrosis-prone C57Bl/6J mice and alveolitis-prone A/J and C3H/HeJ strain and a Genome-wide association analysis in a panel of 27 inbred mice with functional approaches aimed at detecting how various immune cell populations and inflammatory pathways contribute to fibrosis onset.
