Basic research: a Franco-Taiwanese project on medulloblastoma funded under the PLBIO 2025 call for proposals
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Since 2018, collaborative projects between French and Taiwanese teams have received joint funding from the French National Cancer Institute (INCa) and Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) under the “Open Research Projects in Cancer Biology and Sciences” (PLBIO) call for proposals. In 2025, a new collaborative project focusing on medulloblastoma - the most common malignant brain tumour in children - has been selected.
The PLBIO call for proposals is a major driver of basic cancer research funding, accounting for about 20% of the French National Cancer Institute’s budget. It also attracts the most applications.
In accordance with an agreement signed in 2018 between the Institute and Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), successful Franco-Taiwanese collaborative projects receive co-funding: from the Institute on the French side and from the NSTC on the Taiwanese side. Since then, three projects have been funded, totaling €1,872,660.
A project dedicated to the study of a paediatric brain tumour: medulloblastoma
This year, the project “MYC-mediated metabolic adaptations in medulloblastoma”, led by the teams of Olivier Ayrault (Institut Curie, Orsay), Jean-Emmanuel Sarry (Cancer Research Centre of Toulouse), and Jin-Wu Tsai (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taipei), has been selected under the PLBIO 2025 call.
Below is the scientific summary of this study.
"Medulloblastoma (MB), is the most common malignant pediatric brain tumor. MB are divided in four main subgroups of MB (WNT, SHH, Group 3 (G3) and 4 (G4)) with distinct molecular characteristics and patient outcome. G3 and G4 accounting for more than 50% of all cases, are less characterized. G3 is characterized by MYC expression and is mostly associated with poor prognosis.
In order to better understand the biology of medulloblastoma, our laboratory initiated a large-scale project with the aim of collecting and analyzing an international cohort (France, USA and Germany) regrouping 384 MBs (genome (WGS), transcriptome (RNA-seq), proteome, phosphoproteome, metabolome as well as clinical data) to fully model network alterations in MBs. Using extensive integration, our data pinpointed higher lipid metabolites in the subtype associated with MYC high expression and activity (G3MYCHigh) along with the coordination of several metabolic pathways included the de novo lipogenesis pathway and the accumulation of lipid droplets (LDs), cytoplasmic organelles composed of lipid elements that are involved in mitochondrial activity.
In regard to these data, we propose here to: (i) get detailed mechanisms on how MYC influences lipid profiling in MB, (ii) decipher the crosstalk between MYC, lipid signature and mitochondrial (MT) activity in MYC-driven MB and (iii) study the role of diet in modulating metabolic responses of G3MYCHigh MB in vivo.
We believe that the full characterization of these regulatory metabolic mechanisms will enable us to exploit specific vulnerability nodes of G3a tumors and provide a solid basis for therapeutic avenues."