Anne Dejean

Professor at the Pasteur Institute and Research Director at Inserm, head of the Nuclear Organisation and Oncogenesis Unit at the Pasteur Institute, Anne Dejean is internationally renowned for her discovery of the oncogenic role of mutated retinoic acid receptors (RARs) in cancer. She first found such a mutation in Hepatitis B Virus-associated liver cancer. She then discovered the PML-RAR oncogenic fusion protein as the causative genetic event in acute promyelocytic leukemia. Anne Dejean and her team clarified the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the complete cure of this leukemia by retinoic acid and arsenic, a paradigm for oncogene-targeted cancer therapy. She found that therapeutic doses of retinoic acid reactivates the normal functions of the mutated RAR, inducing terminal differentiation of the leukemic cells, whereas arsenic triggers the attachment of the small SUMO protein to PML-RAR, which leads to PML-RAR degradation. She then discovered a key role for SUMO in controlling chromatin function, innate immunity and the establishment of cell identity. She is one of the world leaders in the fields of nuclear receptors and cancer and contributed pionnering concepts in the SUMO area. She is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), 1995, and the French Academy of Sciences, 2004. She has received many prestigious awards, including the Mergier-Bourdeix Prize of the French Academy of Science, 1997, the Gagna and Van Heck Prize, 2003, the Prize L'Oréal-Unesco for Women in Science, 2010, the Grand Prix Inserm, 2014, and the Sjöberg Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2018.