Medical sector

For over two decades, Institut Curie, a pioneer in the digitisation of medical files, has been building one of the largest databases of medical and scientific information in France and in Europe in certain fields. With our support, the institute can attain new goals, thanks to the development new Artificial Intelligence tools that enable the integration and analysis of medical data for the benefit of patients everywhere.

Objective: to determine the best possible therapeutic options and to improve protocols and treatments.

For the third consecutive year, we are supporting Institut Curie’s Big Data project, and the construction of the Curie Database Resource, in particular. This multi-modal integration platform contains clinical and research data; it manages virtual and dynamic spaces made available to researchers to cultivate and accelerate their projects and enable them to make progress in precision research in oncology.

“Machine learning” can help to improve our understanding of each tumour, enabling better classification and grouping of tumours, prediction of their evolution, prognosis and determination of the best treatment for each individual case. The past few months have enabled the development of real time collection of clinical data from patients and its use to support research projects. The projects are thus accelerated and made more efficient, notably by establishing the actual efficacy of a treatment among a patient population, improving clinical decision-making processes and optimising health care.

For more information, see the Institut Curie website

For many years, Bessé has been supporting the development of what was a medical challenge twenty years ago, but is now a new class of therapeutic drugs implementing revolutionary mechanisms. Gene therapy, which uses genes to treat medical disorders, is revolutionising medical treatments in the same way as antibiotics did when they were first introduced in the 1930s.

2020 was a milestone year in many respects for the Translational Gene Therapy Laboratory for Genetic Diseases. In the context of the Covid-19 health crisis, the laboratory was selected by the French ministry of health as one of the research facilities approved to perform PCR tests. The teams have also been pursuing their gene therapy development projects, conducting a first round of tests with a new drug for Stargardt disease, a macular degenerative disease that results in blindness; the results are very promising.

2020 also brought the authorisation to begin a new clinical trial for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, on which the laboratory has already performed 9 years of preclinical studies.

Finally, the laboratory’s certification by the French authorities in July as an industrial integrator in gene therapy is major national recognition of the teams’ expertise; they are already hard at work on the development of new therapeutic drugs.

For more information, see the Gene Therapy laboratory website