TASKS
What is the role of the Cancéropôle Grand Ouest ?
The Cancéropôle is one of the instruments for bringing fundamental research laboratories and clinical units closer. It involves encouraging research transfer, that is the movement from fundamental research to clinical research, the movement from theory to practice. The ultimate aim is to enable patients to benefit from the most innovative therapeutic means and those most appropriate for more rapid treatment of cancers.
What are the work axes and the specific characteristics of the Cancéropôle Grand Ouest?
The scientific strategy of the Cancéropôle Grand Ouest is based around work themes, some of which are specific. These themes are:
- • Vectorisation and Radiotherapy (the ability to target tumours and to provide the medicine at the tumour site)
- • Making the best use of products from the sea in cancerology (research into molecules with anti-tumour activity from or derived from the marine world)
- • Immunotherapy
- • Integrative Biology of Cancers (optimising treatment and making the treatment individual to the tumour and the patient)
- • Experiences, ethics and practices (the study of the human and social care for cancer)
- • Stem cells and cancer
How is the Cancéropôle organised?
It involves the various research teams on the different university sites in the West of France being encouraged to work together in a spirit of complementarity and being able to build a network of "sufficient critical mass".
The Cancéropôle relies on "resource" platforms:
• functional genomics platforms which are an integral part of the Biogenouest network (the identification of genes makes it possible to personalise treatments).
• the Grand Ouest network of Tumour Libraries (RTGO) which allows biological resources to be made available to researchers enabling firstly research into diagnostic factors and elements that makes it possible to predict responses to treatments, and secondly helping in fundamental research.
• functional imaging using MRIs, Doppler ultrasound, and PET scans makes it possible to use non-invasive practices to analyse the functional dynamics of the tumour, to specify the diagnosis and thus adapt the treatment.
• the clinical transfer platform aims to encourage the movement from fundamental research to clinical. Its aim is to facilitate the use of innovative therapeutic strategies in the clinic and to ensure inter-regional coordination of clinical trials resulting from recent biological data.