Gaël Cristofari (IRCAN), winner of the 2025 Michel Delalande Prize from the National Academy of Pharmacy
- Research
on the February 4, 2026
The French National Academy of Pharmacy has awarded the 2025 Michel Delalande Prize to Gaël Cristofari, Inserm Research Director at IRCAN, in the scientific awards category. This prestigious distinction recognizes fundamental research work that opens up major prospects in pharmacology and therapeutics, particularly in the field of cancer.
Exploring the "hidden side of the genome" to better treat cancer
The work of Gaël Cristofari and his team focuses on the "hidden side of the genome," consisting of repeated DNA sequences long considered non-functional, but which nevertheless represent the majority of our chromosomes. At IRCAN (Université Côte d'Azur, Inserm, CNRS), the team is particularly interested in retrotransposons, "jumping genes" whose reactivation in cancer cells generates genetic instability, while constituting a potential therapeutic vulnerability.Recent research has provided a better understanding of how certain epigenetic drugs, such as decitabine, act on these elements of the genome. It also highlights a previously unknown link between hormonal signaling and retrotransposon activity, with possible consequences for antitumor immunity. These results open up concrete avenues for optimizing epigenetic therapies, in particular through targeted combination therapies and better patient selection.
"The 2025 Michel Delalande Prize represents immense recognition of the work of my entire team, which arrived in Nice with the creation of IRCAN in 2012. It is the culmination of a long-term effort, which required the development of entirely new tools to observe and understand these little-known regions of the genome. This award recognizes the close link between fundamental research and medical and pharmacological applications, and shows how the study of the 'hidden side of the genome' can shed light on new therapeutic strategies," emphasizes Gaël Cristofari.
