CHRISTOPHE PIERREUX
BIOGRAPHY
Christophe Pierreux, Professor UCLouvain and Maître de Recherche at F.R.S.-FNRS, is a biologist from UNamur that obtained his PhD degree in Biomedical Sciences at the de Duve Institute/UCLouvain. He spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now, the Crick Institute) in London, UK, and then moved back to the de Duve Institute in Brussels.
In 2008, he was appointed Chercheur Qualifié at F.R.S.-FNRS and developed his own research group at the de Duve Institute with a focus on intercellular communications during pancreas and thyroid organogenesis.
His group demonstrated the critical role of endothelial cells on epithelial morphogenesis via the production of soluble and sedimentable, i.e. extracellular vesicles, factors in the environment. More recently, he also focused on EVs in thyroid cancer development.
TOPIC: ‘TOWARDS “PAN3DP BIOPRINTED PANCREATIC TISSUE” - TOPOLOGICAL AND BIOCHEMICAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN EPITHELIAL AND ENDOTHELIAL CELLS IN DEVELOPING PANCREAS’
Organs like the pancreas are composed of epithelial, mesenchymal and vascular tissues. These are not only important for adult organ function but also and very importantly for organ formation during development. Absence or excess of mesenchymal/vascular tissues impact on pancreatic epithelial morphogenesis and differentiation. It is also more and more evident that localization of mesenchymal/vascular tissues or existence of specialized and localized niches affect pancreas morphogenesis and differentiation. Intercellular communications within these niches have been so far challenging to study because of the low concentration, localized production and diversity of the signals released.
We will first present our detailed analysis of the spatial organization of the main cell types (epithelial, mesenchymal, endothelial) in the embryonic pancreas, and the quantitative information extracted from these light-sheet microscopy 3D images.
Secondly, we will present a computational interactomic analysis, based on scRNAseq datasets to identify ligands involved in epithelial-endothelial reciprocal communications during pancreas development.