SEMINAR ; Pr Jacque NUNES - “Immunity & cancer : butyrophilins in Vγ9Vδ2 T cell cytotoxicity against tumor cells".

Upon a two-year technical degree (BTS) in Strasbourg, I joined the faculty of sciences at the campus Marseille-Luminy to follow top courses and programs in Immunology. In the late 80’s, I started my master then thesis work in the research team of Claude MAWAS who was developing the human immunology associated with the hematology department of the Institut Paoli-Calmettes (Cancer Research Hospital in Marseille). I got the opportunity to address the molecular complexity of human T lymphocytes by using several monoclonal antibodies targeting different adhesion molecules, such as the CD28 costimulatory molecule.

99749. this period, I started to be interested on cell signaling especially how to identify the encoding intracellular signals induced via the adhesion molecules triggering. In the middle of the 90’s, London was a great place to study these aspects with the presence of many outstanding cell signaling research teams. For my first post-doc, I joined the Lymphocyte Activation Laboratory of Doreen CANTRELL (Imperial Cancer Research Fund, London) where we described that signaling pathways induced by a natural ligand or an agonist monoclonal antibody could be completely different (Nunès et al. J. Exp. Med. 1994). To perform these biochemical studies with physiological immune models, for my second post-doc, I choose to reach a team that was deeply involved in engineering mouse models to decipher T cell signaling. In 1995, I joined the ”Interactions lymphocytaires” Laboratory (head: Bernard MALISSEN, Centre d’Immunologie Marseille-Luminy) to study T cell signaling in primary mouse T cells (Ardouin et al. Immunity 1999).

In 1997, I joined what will become later the Centre de Recherche en Cancérologie de Marseille (CRCM), in a team headed by Daniel OLIVE. I manage today this team ”Immunity and Cancer “(co-head). Since then, I widened my research area by exploring the signaling pathways ruling the activity of innate and adaptive immune cells (Fos et al. JI 2008, Celis-Gutierrez et al. EMBO J. 2015, Bernard et al. JITC 2022).

With my actual collaborators, we developed an expert team in the field of investigations on immune cells involved in tumor microenvironment.