It is a world first. In May 2023, Emmanuel Macron announced the creation of twelve new University Hospital Institutes (IHU), including an IHU dedicated to women’s cancers.
It has just been officially launched. Led by the Institut Curie, Inserm (National Institute of Health and Medical Research) and PSL University (Paris Sciences et Lettres), the Institute is physically based at the Institut Curie (in Paris and Saint-Ouen). In addition to the State grant (20 million as part of France 2030), the IHU will receive funding from the Curie Foundation (10 million) and other private funds (MSD Avenir, for example, is funding a research project on rare ovarian cancers without suitable treatment).
“Every year, 78,000 new women are diagnosed with female cancer and 20,000 die from it,” remember Professor Anne Vincent-Salomon, director of the Women’s Cancer Institute. The objective of the IHU will be to better understand these cancers, better treat them and better prevent them.
Women’s Cancer atlas
Read also: Breast cancer: less than one in two women participated in organized screening in France
But he also intends to provide more individualised support to patients: the youngest who are suffering “a real tsunami in their life journey” but, at the other end of the spectrum, elderly women would be offered priority and very specific onco-geriatric pathways.
Among the many research projects, two are identified as major: the creation, over ten years, of a Women’s Cancer Atlas (a reference database of female cancers) using the most advanced technologies; and the development of “tumor-on-chip” technologies: “These are super organoids, which reconstitute the entire micro-environment of the tumor » , describes the Pre Anne Vincent-Salomon. These “biological avatars of patients” must in particular make it possible to test their response to different treatments, in order to choose the most effective and least impactful.
