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a researcher from INSERM Dijon rewarded for her work on early detection

Carmen Garrido, research director at INSERM (National Institute of Health and Medical Research) received the pink ribbon grand prize for her research on the rapid screening of breast cancer through a simple blood test.

Doctor Carmen Garrido, has just received the grand prize for pink ribbon research for her studies which, in the long term, should make it possible to detect breast cancer at an early stage. A simple blood test will be possible to make a diagnosis.

In 2017, Carmen Garrido already won the first “future” pink ribbon prize. “It meant that they thought there was a future for this project and in the next four years I was able to show that it worked ”, explains Carmen Garrido, INSERM research director.

“Just with a blood test”

This new title awarded by Pink ribbon is endowed with a sum of 200,000 euros. It rewards this study on breast cancer which began several years ago. “The objective of my work is to have an early detection of breast cancer just with a simple blood test ”, added Carmen Garrido.

Clinical studies have been carried out on breast cancer patients at the Georges-François Leclerc hospital center (CGFL) and the Besançon CHU.

Early detection which would limit the use of an imaging technique such as CT or mammography. “It is an alternative to these techniques, which work well, but are not without risk for patients who are subjected to radiation. The risk is low, but it is real ”.

Costly and restrictive techniques which the blood test could replace. “I proposes something that in the long term could be done by general practitioners ” ajoute Carmen Garrido.

A team of 50 researchers

Spanish born in Seville, Carmen Garrido studied in Madrid and then mostly in the United States. She arrived in France more than twenty-five years ago for personal reasons. She arrived at INSERM in Dijon in 1995 to do research, she spent her entire career there until becoming a research director in 2002. “Today I am an exceptional class director at INSERM.”

Carmen Garrido has a multidisciplinary team of fifty people, doctors, biologists, pharmacists, physicists, chemists. “We can do research from different perspectives, which means that everyone is enriched by the knowledge of others”, adds the research director.

The team’s theme is so-called “heat shock” proteins, also called stress proteins, which accumulate in cells during stressful situations. Proteins that are found in numbers in the cells of cancer patients. “As soon as I arrived 25 years ago I discovered that cancer cells had a lot of this stress protein and that they were responsible for the resistance of cancer cells to anti-cancer chemotherapy ”, specifies the researcher.

If they are counted, they make it possible to detect breast cancer early

A price of 200,000 euros

The INSERM Dijon research team was awarded the sum of 200,000 euros by the Ruban Rose association to continue funding research and improving techniques. “This money will be used to finance the multicenter clinical study that we are organizing with the early phase unit of the CGFL”.

“Our goal is to arrive at a simpler approach requiring just 500 microliters of blood to quantify our stress proteins and thus detect the possible appearance of metastases and whether or not a patient responds to anticancer therapy”, specifies the research director.

Research will therefore continue in Burgundy. It will still be necessary to wait before the blood test is carried out and it is used by the doctors.

Pink ribbon awards

The pink ribbon awards for research, created by the Ruban Rose association in 2003, are intended to support basic and clinical research, innovations and progress in terms of screening techniques, reconstructive surgery, psychology or even quality improvement. life of the sick.

Since 2004 in France, more than 400,000 euros have been collected and donated to more than 80 researchers and caregivers. The pink ribbon grand prize is the highest distinction awarded by the association.

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