2022 L'Oréal-UNESCO Award, Seqens Prize and Turpin Prize: recognition for the Institut Pasteur's female scientists

•   Three Institut Pasteur scientists receive the 2022 Rising Talents France Award as part of the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science program

On October 12, 2022, three Institut Pasteur scientists received the 2022 Rising Talents France Award as part of the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science program. The awardees are the postdoctoral fellow Élodie Calvez, who studies mosquito-borne virus transmission mechanisms, the PhD student Lucienne Nouchikian, who focuses on interactions between proteins in pathogenic bacteria, and the PhD student Viviana Scoca who researches HIV dynamics in cell nuclei. The prize includes an endowment to help the Institut Pasteur's talented young female scientists to continue their research and help to advance scientific knowledge in their field.

Read the press release

 

•    Paola B Arimondo, winner of the 2022 Seqens Prize awarded by the French Academy of Sciences

The Seqens Prize targets the field of therapeutic chemistry and/or pharmaco-chemistry related to chemical drug mechanisms. It rewards an innovation, a breakthrough or a novel approach in the field of small synthetic molecules with therapeutic value. The prize is awarded to a scientist working in a public or private French laboratory.
 
This year's prize went to Paola B Arimondo, head of the Epigenetic Chemical Biology Unit, director of the joint research unit UMR 3523 CNRS Chemistry for Life ("Chem4Life"), director of the Department of Structural Biology and Chemistry and co-leader of the "Antimicrobial resistance" scientific area. The prize recognizes all of her research on epigenetic modifications and their role in disease. With her team, she develops molecules capable of inhibiting these modifications and has opened a new avenue by synthesizing the first bisubstrate inhibitors of DNA methylation and using them to reprogram cancer cells and block pathogenic infections.

 

•    Sandrine Etienne-Manneville, winner of the 2022 René Turpin Cancer Research Prize – Institut de France Foundation

The René Turpin Cancer Research Prize, launched in 2004, is a biennial prize awarded on a proposal from the French Academy of Sciences in the category of chemistry and life sciences. This year's prize went to Sandrine Etienne-Manneville, head of the Physiological and Pathological Cellular Dynamics Unit and co-leader of the Cancer Initiative. The award recognizes her research, and that of her team, on the molecular mechanisms controlling the migration and invasion of normal and tumor cells, especially in the central nervous system and the brain. This research has led to the elucidation of signaling pathways that have been conserved over the course of evolution, enabling the front-to-back polarization of migrating cells and the identification of mechanisms for the functional coordination of the cytoskeleton and adhesion structures during migration and collective invasion.

The Seqens Prize and the Turpin Prize were presented at a special ceremony held under the magnificent Cupola of the Institut de France on October 18.

Photos : Institut Pasteur/Hafida Fsihi