Médaille de l'innovation 2018 : Valérie Castellani

On the occasion of her CNRS innovation medal awarded by the in 2018, Valérie Castellani, a specialist in developmental biology at the NeuroMyoGene Institute, discusses her journey. She conducts fundamental research on the development of the nervous system, with her team.
She works on neuroblastoma, a paediatric cancer of the peripheral nervous system. Her approach was to study this cancer from a developmental biology angle. This has led to the development of a new tumour model, which places human tumour cells in avian embryo tissues, this replicates the evolution of neuroblastoma.
This method enables tumour masses to regenerate in a few days and to obtain metastatic dispersion programmes. An innovation with strong potential that seems to also be applicable to other types of cancer. She co-founded the start-up OncoFactory in 2016 with her colleague Céline Delloye-Bourgeois, with whom she won the Concours Mondial d'Innovation. The start-up aims to use this tumour model in developing predictive biomarkers for personalised medicine and pre-clinical analysis.