Géraldine Guasch
Researcher
Bio :As a stem cell and cancer biologist I have had a longstanding interest in understanding the earliest phases of tumor formation. This led me to study stem cell biology in the blood in normal and disease state at INSERM, France. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University, New York in the internationally renowned laboratory of Dr. Elaine Fuchs, I have worked on skin stem cell niche, cell signaling, and their relevance to the development of cancer using a mouse model I developed for a common and poorly understood area of carcinogenesis: the transitional epithelia (Guasch et al., Cancer Cell 2007). Then, I took an Assistant Professor position in a Developmental Biology Department within a pediatric medical center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, USA where I have established a research program that used basic discoveries of stem cell biology to impact several clinical programs including oncology, skin engineering, and anorectal malformations. Now in France, I am a Research Director with tenure at the INSERM in the Cancer Research Center in Marseille, where my group uses the transition zones as a unique model to investigate the molecular basis for how normal epithelial stem cells participate to normal tissue growth and might become tumorigenic. Since 2019, I am also the Scientific Director of the 3D-Hub-O organoid platform labeled by the Canceropôle Sud and IBiSA that allows researchers to develop 3D in vitro multicellular models derived from normal or tumoral tissues that reproduce the characteristics, the heterogeneity and the microanatomy of the corresponding organs studied. With these models we study mechanisms of drug resistance and we developped miniaturization of organoid cultures, to search for predictive markers of response to treatment with the ultimate aim of developing automated, large-scale screening approaches customized to the organoids derived from each patient.
