Unit Director: Edith Heard

The Genetics and Developmental Biology Department (or Unit) of the Institut Curie was inaugurated in October 2008, with the support of CNRS and Inserm and in partnership with University Paris 6 (UPMC). This department is located in a brand new building dedicated to research on Developmental Biology and Cancer, on the Paris campus of the Institut Curie. The Unit currently consists of height internationally competitive research teams and will ultimately host a total of around 10 teams.

The goal of this Unit is based on the simple, but fundamental, concept that an understanding of normal developmental regulation should provide us with a better understanding of the basis of human pathology. During development, cells have to integrate different types of molecular and physical information. This enables them to sense their environment, to interact with other cells, to proliferate, and to make decisions such as whether to maintain pluripotency or trigger differentiation and acquire specialisation for tissue-specific functions. Cancerisation can result from perturbations at each of these levels and is linked to misregulation of developmental signalling pathways, uncontrolled cellular proliferation and a loss of cellular identity. The Institut Curie is committed to understanding and treating cancer and in this context, the new Unit provides a vital link between basic research in developmental biology and clinical applications aimed at improving diagnosis and prognosis as well as developing innovative anti-cancer therapies.

The Genetics and Developmental Biology Unit is a multi-disciplinary department encompassing several themes, the major goal of which is to study the events controlling cellular identity and behaviour in a developmental context. Using a combination of different animal models including Drosophila, mouse and zebrafish, the researchers of this unit are studying the fundamental mechanisms of development, from germ line stem cells to embryonic differentiation and morphogenesis, to the acquisition of complex functions: