I completed my PhD in June 2019 at the Jules Verne University of Picardy (France) where I was supervised by both Prof. Laurent Metzinger and Prof. Jacques Rochette. During my PhD, I studied the role of E3 ubiquitin ligase TRIM37 in chondrocytes and involvement of miR-223 in control of TRIM37 function.
Following my PhD, I joined the lab of Prof. Basil Hubbard at the University of Alberta (Canada) to complete my first Postdoc. Prof. Hubbard is an expert in development of gene editing technologies and other macromolecular therapeutics. I thus considerably expanded my repertoire of experimental techniques to include CRISPR Cas13 methodology to control gene function. I also contributed to the global effort to combat COVID-19 by screening for drugs against NSP15 protein that used an innovative gene reporter assay to screen a 100,000 molecules library. Such high throughput searches for novel therapeutics provided me with new competence in drugs screening using small molecule libraries (publication in preparation).
I reached out to Dr. Victor Boyartchuk at NTNU’s Centre of Molecular Inflammation Research, a Centre of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Norway. Since OA intersects chondrocyte function and inflammatory biology, I wished to work with Dr. Boyartchuk, an expert in Inflammation and address this question to complement his ongoing studies. I joined his team in November 2020 and have since developed a range of new model lines deficient for TRIM37 and CD5L in macrophages and chondrocytes. Our preliminary data demonstrate the major role of these 2 proteins in cartilage (publication in preparation).