[1] Patrick Mehlen, a former student at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, defended his Ph.D. thesis at the Claude-Bernard University in 1995.
Patrick Mehlen was one of the discoverers of the addictive receptor paradigm: from an original mechanism of cell death to clinical trials; explained below and which constitutes the presentation of his scientific work.
They have shown that DCC and UNC5H are all dependency receptors in cancer cells: whereas in the presence of their netrin-1 ligand, they transduce classical "positive" signals, in the absence of netrin-1, they actively trigger apoptosis.
This has in fact been formally proven by showing that in mice, the invalidation of UNC5H3, the overexpression of netrin-1 in the digestive tract or the specific inactivation of pro-apoptotic DCC activity similarly caused cancer progression.
With this in mind, they have generated a drug candidate - anti-netrin-1/NP137 antibody - which is currently being tested in patients with very advanced cancers with very encouraging signs of clinical activity.