Atlas Launch: an ambitious public/private partnership collaborative research program
In order to improve the understanding and treatment of lymphomas, the collaborative public/private research program ATLAS has just been created thanks to the partnership signed by Bristol Myers Squibb, Inserm Transfert for Inserm/the CIML, with two scientific teams from the CIML (B. Nadel/S. Roulland and P. Milpied), and the Carnot CALYM Institute.
With 86,000 new cases per year in the United States and 18,000 in France, and mortality rates that remain high, lymphoma is a public health problem.
The ambition of this joint research program is to provide the first high-resolution dynamic analysis of follicular lymphomas and diffuse large B-cell lymphomas in their microenvironment.
The challenge is to use advanced cell characterization techniques to decipher the basis of the pathophysiology of these cancers. To do this, the research teams (B. Nadel/S. Roulland and P. Milpied) will build an “Atlas” that will identify the main biological parameters associated with transformation, tumor growth, relapse and resistance to treatments. After a first phase that has demonstrated the feasibility of innovative technological approaches developed in the academic research laboratories involved, ATLAS is now entering the heart of the matter. These techniques will now be applied to a large number of biological samples representative of these two of the most frequent types of B lymphomas.
The ATLAS project will benefit from biological samples from the CeVi collection of live lymphoma cells, set up by the Carnot CALYM Institute. This unique collection includes more than 2000 clinically annotated patient samples. It allows the realization of projects aiming at the functional characterization of tumors with their microenvironment.
Clinical expertise will also be brought to the project through the involvement of expert clinicians members of the LYSA (Pr. G. Salles, MSKCC, New York; Dr. G. Brisou, HCL Lyon; Pr. C. Haioun, CHU H. Mondor, Paris; Pr. F. Jardin, Centre H. Becquerel Center, Rouen).
