For the past 5 years, Novartis has awarded a DREAMER (“Développement de la Recherche Académique Médicale En Immuno-Rhumatologie”) research grant every year to 10 winners whose project combines perspectives of clinical interest and originality.
Among the 10 winners this year, a DREAMER grant was awarded to Philippe Mertz, a rheumatologist specializing in autoinflammatory diseases, who has just joined the “Immune cell signaling and retroviral infection” team of C. Randriamampita as part of his PhD co-directed by Jérôme Delon and Sophie Georgin-Lavialle. The award ceremony took place on February 2.

The aim of the project is to elucidate the links between actin cytoskeleton and inflammation through the prism of autoinflammatory actinopathies, rare genetic diseases affecting the different regulators of the actin cytoskeleton and leading to systemic inflammation from a very young age. The project focuses on a better understanding of the inflammatory mechanisms disrupted by certain pathogenic variants of the CDC42 protein (RHO GTPase playing a primordial role in the regulation of the actin cytoskeleton), and also on other proteins involved in actin polymerization.