This year, thanks to donations from the inhabitants of the Pyrénées-Orientales, the departmental committee of the League once morest Cancer is funding the work of Montpellier scientist Eric Julien, who is carrying out hopeful research on the early detection and treatment of cancers of the aggressive prostates.
In 2022, the departmental committee of the League once morest Cancer notably funded the work of four Montpellier researchers to the tune of 100,000 euros. For the latter, the support is significant. “This represents almost half of our operating budget excluding salaries”, underlines one of the subsidized researchers, Eric Julien. A native of Perpignan, the latter is currently research director at the CNRS in Montpellier. He is working on proteins (Suv4-20h) characteristic of aggressive forms of prostate cancer. Objective: to make it possible to detect them early.
“Generally, patients do not die from prostate cancer itself, but from metastases that colonize vital organs, recalls Eric Julien. If the disease is diagnosed early enough, you have a 100% chance of recovery. But often the cancer progresses without noticeable symptoms.”
More predictive markers
Problem: the current screening method can detect the disease early, but not whether it is an aggressive form likely to colonize other organs. However, treatments for prostate cancer can cause significant side effects. Hence the importance of knowing as soon as possible if the game is worth the candle.
This is precisely the challenge of the research of Eric Julien and his team: “The Suv4-20h proteins are very present in the metastatic forms and appear from the early stages. They might be more predictive markers of the evolution of the disease.”
The icing on the cake: still within the framework of research funded by Ligue66, members of the team, coordinated by doctoral student Fatima Alhourani, discovered that by crossing two molecules targeting SUV4-20h, this gave a cocktail reducing the number of cancer cells dramatically. Scientists hope to be able to launch clinical trials within a few years.
