July 4th, 2025
One more success: Congratulations to Charline YTIER, who was awarded the Best Poster Prize at the Young Researcher Colloquium of the AFM-Telethon (Parc Floral, Paris) !!! 👏🏅🎉😊.
July 2025
Celebration time once more (01/07/2025) !!! 😊🎉.
Contratulations to Clara DAVID, who officially won a PhD fellowship from the AMU Doctoral School ED658, to work with us on the mechanisms of intramuscular fibroadipose infiltrations in neuromuscular pathologies. Welcome Clara!
July 2024
Lots of good news today (08/07/2024), and celebration time! 😊🎉.
We were awarded two grants for our projects on FAPs, one from the FRC (Federation pour la recherche sur le cerveau), in Collaboration with Frederique Magdinier (MMG), and one from AFM-Telethon, both for two years. In addition, Charline Ytier was awarded a PhD fellowship from AFM-Telethon and will start her PhD with us! Congrats Charline!!!
And, I successfully defended my HDR on june 21st!
Excellent beginning of a nice summer!
May 2024
Paper publication day (24/05) 😊🎉.
I’m thrilled to share that our review article, written in collaboration with Osvaldo Contreras, Marcelo Flores-Opazo, Daniel Kopinke, and Gordon S. Lynch, is now published in Molecular Aspects of Medicine.
Marcelo Flores-Opazo, Daniel Kopinke, Françoise Helmbacher, Rodrigo Fernández-Verdejo, Mauro Tuñón-Suárez, Gordon S. Lynch, Osvaldo Contreras. Fibro-adipogenic progenitors in physiological adipogenesis and intermuscular adipose tissue remodeling. Molecular Aspects of Medicine (2024), June, 101277. | PDF | PMID : 38788527 |
Mars 2024
After having postponed it for way too long, and having wasted university approvals obtained in 2006 and 2011, I finally made obtaining my habilitation to direct researches (HDR) the priority of 2024. The date of my long due HDR defense has been fixed to 21/06/2024 (Amphi 12, 14h00, Luminy Campus).
October 2023
An apology for the lack of updates recently. We are excited to move back to the main building before the end of this month.
Among other long due updates, we were thrilled to be awarded an incentive action grant by the MarMaRa (Marseille Maladies Rares) Institute from Aix-Marseille University, to develop, in mice and in human IPS cells (in collaboration with F. Magdinier, MMG), a CRISPR/AAV-based method to block fibro-adipogenic differentiation in muscle pathologies.
Besides this, I was promoted CRHC at the CNRS, effective since April 2023 (and retroactive as of 10/2022). On a personal side, I’ve had two CT-scans in a row concluding complete remission after a 2023 recurrence.
April 2023
Congrats to our collaborators Rui Li & al from the lab of Stefan Offermanns at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, for a great paper showing that FAT1 controls YAP/TAZ degradation via the E3 ligase MIB2 during angiogenesis. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-37671-x
September 2022
Happy to share our new preprint “An intragenic FAT1 regulatory element deleted in muscular dystrophy patients drives muscle and mesenchyme expression during development”.
This is a long due follow up of our past discovery of FSHD-associated Copy number variants deleting a putative FAT1 enhancer (Caruso et al., Plos Genetics 2013). We have explored this possibility by investigating the transcriptional activity of this putative enhancer in vivo.
- Nathalie Caruso, Angela K. Zimmermann, Tarana Nigam, Celine Becker, Karelia Lipson, Françoise Helmbacher. “An intragenic FAT1 regulatory element deleted in muscular dystrophy patients drives muscle and mesenchyme expression during development” Biorxiv (2022), September 17 | doi: 10.1101/2022.09.14.507898 | PDF
January 2022
I’m delighted to share that the manuscript “Astrocyte-intrinsic and extrinsic Fat1 activities regulate astrocyte development and angiogenesis in the retina” is now published in Development (2022) | doi:10.1242/dev.192047 | PDF |
This study uncovers astrocyte-intrinsic and extrinsic Fat1 activities that influence astrocyte migration polarity, proliferation and maturation, the disruption of which impacts retinal vascular development and maintenance of vascular architecture.
December 2020
Hot off the press! Delighted to share that our publication “Fat1 deletion promotes hybrid EMT state, tumour stemness and metastasis“, led by Ievgenia Pastushenko and Federico Mauri, from the lab of Cedric Blanpain (Laboratory of Stem Cells and Cancer, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)) is now out in Nature. December 16, 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03046-1 | PMID: 33328637 |
This study shows that FAT1 acts as a tumour suppressor gene, its loss promoting initiation and malignant progression of skin and lung squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs). Through a combination of studies using mouse and human SCC models, this works not only uncovers key mechanisms by which FAT1 disruption promotes a hybrid EMT phenotype, with simultaneous acquisition of mesenchymal characteristics and maintenance of epithelial programs, but also identifies drug vulnerabilities and resistances of FAT1-deficient SCCs, the knowledge of which will be key for personalized medicine
October 2020
In press! Our work in collaboration with the lab of Cynthia Andoniadou (King’s College, London) featuring the roles of FAT & Dachsous Cadherins during pituitary development, is now out at JCI Insight.
Emily J Lodge, Paraskevi Xekouki, Tatiane S Silva, Cristiane Kochi, Carlos A Longui, Fabio R Faucz, Alice Santambrogio, James L Mills, Nathan Pankratz, John Lane, Dominika Sosnowska, Tina Hodgson, Amanda L Patist, Philippa Francis-West, Francoise Helmbacher, Constantine Stratakis, Cynthia L Andoniadou. Requirement of FAT and DCHS protocadherins during hypothalamic-pituitary development. JCI Insight, (2020) Oct 27 |PMID: 33108146 | PDF |
June 2020
Proud to announce that a review article co-authored with Sigmar Stricker, is now out in Seminars in Cell and Developmental Biology.
Helmbacher, F.#, Stricker, S.#. Tissue cross talks governing limb muscle development and regeneration (Review article). Seminars in Cell and Developmental Biology, (2020), June 7 |PMID: 32517852 | #: co-corresponding | PDF: Helmbacher & Stricker 2020 |
June 2020
Aix-Marseille University and our CNRS lab are progressively reopening after the Covid-19 lockdown. AMU has announced that we are officially allowed to welcome new interns to start in July. So if you are a student interested by a summer internship with us, we’ll be happy to have you around and offer you a safe environment to start practicing life as a scientist. Contact me for details.
May 2020
I am thrilled to share the newest preprint, posted on bioRxiv and submitted during the Covid-self-isolation period!
Helmbacher, F. Fat1 regulates astrocyte maturation and angiogenesis in the retina. BioRxiv preprint
April 2019
As a phase of renovations of the IBDM building has started (plan campus), we (half of the IBDM teams) just moved to our new temporary labs, in a lovely part of the Luminy campus, near the CINAM (the last rectangular building left to the CINAM buildings on the map below).
helmbacherlab.org 