Resistance to Chemotherapy

Biophysics and Cancer Biology

Julie Guillermet-Guibert is a researcher at INSERM (French National Institute of Health and Medical Research), a research institute in France. She obtained a Ph.D. at Paul Sabatier University, which has an affiliation with INSERM as a joint research unit. Her Ph.D. work was on the signaling pathways of somatostatin G protein-coupled receptor and their selectivity for normal and cancerous cells. She is currently the team leader of SigDYN at INSERM. Her team investigates the signaling pathways of cancer cells specifically focusing on pancreatic and ovarian cancer cells. She was awarded a Jean-Marie Lehn Excellence Prize for her work with Dr. Maximillian Reichert on the resistance of pancreatic cancer cells to signal-targeted therapy. 

One of her more recent publications, “Mechanical Control of Cell Proliferation Increases Resistance to Chemotherapeutic Agents”, is about the resistance of cancer cells to chemotherapy. Through experimentation using pancreatic cells and theoretical modeling, the research team found the reason for the reduced effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs is due to compressive stress. The cancer cells under compressive would experience mechanical alterations which one of the alterations is decreasing cell proliferation. This reduces the efficacy of chemotherapic drugs because the drugs target rapidly proliferating cells so when cancer cells proliferate at a slower rate, they would not be affected by the drugs as regular cancerous cells would. The team came up with a solution suggesting to use sensors, coupled with chemotherapeutic agents, to enforce the proliferation of cancer cells under compressive stress. 

References

F. Rizzuti et al., “Mechanical control of cell proliferation increases resistance to chemotherapeutic agents,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 128103 (2020)

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v13/147