According to the World Health Organization, cancer caused 9.6 million deaths last year, making it the second leading cause of death in the world and adding significant cost burden to public health. Cancer, or tumour, can arise from any organ of the body causing a problematic heterogeneity in the disease, which makes it difficult both for early diagnosis and for efficient treatment. In the last 25 years, great strides have been made in understanding the basic biology that determines tumor onset and progression thanks to the collective effort of universities, research institutions and pharmaceutical companies worldwide. The role of fundamental research is key: the understanding of the complexity of cancer biology opens therapeutic opportunities for new and more effective treatment. Here we will discuss how the use of “omics” technologies permitted the identification of new key player in cancer biology and the challenges to bring these discoveries into clinics.
Pierre Close is Associate Professor, senior FNRS and WELBIO investigator at the University of Liege, director of the lab of cancer signaling at GIGA-Research Institute. His work is devoted to tRNA epitranscriptopmics and its role in cancer. After a training in Pharmaceutical Sciences and a PhD in Molecular Cancer Biology at ULIEGE, he completed his post-doctoral training at Cancer Research UK (London, UK). He was an EMBO post-doctoral fellow at CRUK from 2006-2009 and received several awards, among them the Quinquennial Scientific Prize from the Belgian royal Academy of Medicine (2020). His research interests focus on non-genetic mechanisms of cancer cell adaptation with a particular focus on mRNA translation reprogramming and tRNA regulation. His laboratory recently uncovered the importance of wobble tRNA modification in cancer development and drug resistance. His work is supported by competitive national and international grants.
Francesca Rapino is FNRS and WELBIO investigator at the University of Liege, director of the lab of cancer stemness at GIGA-Research Institute. She has made key discoveries in the field of tRNA epitrancriptomics and cancer and her lab is now focusing on the priming role of tRNAs in differentiation and cancer stem cells establishment. After training in Molecular Biology at the University of Tor Vergata (Rome, Italy), she obtained a PhD in Molecular Pharmacy at the Goethe University (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) and then join the University of Liege for her post-doc. She has been awarded of several national and international prizes such as the King Baudouin Foundation award for biochemical research on cancer, and of competitive grants to support her work, (Welbio, Foundation against cancer). She has also been awarded of the ERC starting grant in 2020.