Philippe Bertolino

Background

About Philippe Bertolino

I head the Tumour Environment & Pituitary Oncology group. Our team has an acknowledged expertise on Pituitary tumours study/management, we covers all the aspect of managing pituitary tumours from the bench to the clinic. We are positioned in the national HYPO Pituitary Reference network and the instigation of the PITUICARE register by G. Raverot provide access to a large number of samples with clinical history (120-150 patients operated/year). Since more than 15 years I work a TGFb-related group of cytokines named Activins with the major goal to elucidate their exact contribution in adult tissues and pathological conditions that affect pancreatic tissues and the pituitary gland. I have a solid expertise in: i) modelling physio-pathological and cancer conditions and ii) immuno-histological analysis. Such expertise is exemplified in many publications where our work report the importance of Activin-signalling pathways. We discovered the adipokine role of GDF3 and the importance of targeting the ActivinB/Alk7 signaling axis to protect against DIO. I further contribute to highlight the intra-tumour trans-differentiation that exist in-vivo in endocrine pancreatic tumours (Lu et, Gastroenterology 2010) and characterize the major role of ActivinB in controlling the differentiation of pancreatic b-cell tumours (Ripoche et al, Mol Cell Biol. To the same extent, our work has identified the role to the Activin/Tgfb target TGFbi/BigH3 matrix protein in the onset of typeI diabetes (Patry et al, Diabetes 2015) and more recently in the early immunosuppressive response mediated in PDAC-onset (Goehrig et al, Gut 2019). More recently, our recent work led us to identified the ActivnB-ALK7 receptor as a major actor of the aggressiveness and the plasticity of human Pituitary prolactinomas tumours (Principe et al, Endocr. Relat Cancer 2018). Through screening strategies within mouse on human tumour we have identified a number of appealing Activin ligand/receptor with potent therapeutic targeting and have been using Antibody based approaches to block their function in vivo. We are now exploring the impact of those signalling molecules in the functional exchanges that exist between tumour cells and their microenvironment with a special interest on the mechanisms driving the initiation and the plastic remodelling of tumours.