NEWS
2011 - 09 - 13 Outstanding poster for Christelle Ghoneim, Microarray Center
Christelle Ghoneim, post-doctoral researcher at the Microarray Center , has been rewarded the best poster at the Oncotran Conference which was organized by the Centre Alexis Vautrin in Nancy on September 8-9, 2011.
For this second edition, this conference focused on Translational Research in the field of Oncology: “from the research unit to the patient and from the patient to the research unit”. The conference was aiming to gather biologists, technicians, research scientists from the Greater Region and especially from Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. The main objective was also to strengthen collaborations between pharmaceutical companies, research units, universities and industry. Christelle Ghoneim from the Microarray Center, CRP-Santé, working in the field of Oncology introduced a poster on “Microarray analysis reveals signatures of microRNAs and genetranscripts in human squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma of the lung” which was rewarded as the best and most outstanding one, financed by Amgen with a 500 € support.
In this poster, Christelle Ghoneim described the study and research on MicroRNAs, which are small non-coding RNAs known as negative regulators of gene expression. They are emerging as important regulators of cancer-related processes and recent findings suggest that they could act as tumor suppressor genes or oncogenes in various tumor types.
In this study funded by Luxembourg FNR through the CORE programme, Christelle Ghoneim, under the supervision of Dr. Laurent Vallar, Head of the Microarray Center, analyzed miRNA expression profiles in the two most common types of non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), adenocarcinoma (AC) and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), and she correlated themiRNAs expression patterns with changes observed in gene expression.
She has driven her research thanks to different methods and material such as patient simple collection, RNA extraction, microarrays, co-express analyses, Gene Level and miRNA microarrays Analysis, qPCR validation, data mining.
She obtained promising and relevant results as:
- Characterization of new miRNA signatures for lung adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma.
- Identification of two miRNAs whose expression patterns discriminate AC from SCC
- - Identification of new specific oncomiR candidates with yet undescribed role in AC or SCC
- Detection of several co-expression events by co-expression analysis of mRNA and miRNA expression data and identification of specific putative mRNA:miRNA pairs
- Establishment of a complex signaling networks that may reflect lung cancer tumorigenesis and progression. The poster was recognized by the jury as the most detailed and discerning one.