Dr Ablain has long been interested in understanding the mechanisms of tumor initiation and progression, with the aim of discovering new vulnerabilities in cancer cells. During his PhD in Dr. Hugues de Thé's laboratory in Paris, he helped elucidate the mechanism of one of the few examples of curative cancer treatment : retinoic acid in acute promyelocytic leukemia. For his postdoctorate, he joined Dr Leonard Zon's laboratory at Harvard Medical School to study the biology of melanoma using zebrafish. Melanoma is an extremely aggressive skin cancer that often remains fatal despite recent therapeutic advances.Genetic alterations identified in human tumors offer a unique window into the molecular pathways of malignant transformation, but their functional characterization remains incomplete.
Dr Ablain has devised a method for rapidly generating zebrafish models that faithfully reproduce all the genotypes found in human melanoma. He was thus able to establish the major oncogenic role of SPRED1 gene loss in mucosal melanoma. In 2020, he set up his own research group at the Lyon Cancer Research Center . His recent work has identified the NECTIN1 adhesion gene as a novel suppressor of metastasis in melanoma. Building on these results, the Ablain laboratory aims to complete our current understanding of the molecular mechanisms regulating the early stages of tumor dissemination.