Starting date: January 2021
Work Programme
The Onco-Metabolomics Team (OMB) is a multidisciplinary team that fosters close collaboration between analytical chemists, epidemiologists, bioinformaticians, and statisticians to conceptualize and implement metabolic–nutrition–cancer epidemiology studies. OMB studies metabolic perturbations, nutritional and dietary factors, and the exposome in cancer development by implementing modern liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS)-based analytical techniques to measure and identify metabolites in various biospecimens and to study metabolite variations associated with cancer outcomes.
OMB also undertakes studies to identify novel biomarkers of dietary, lifestyle, and environmental exposures for cancer risk factors along with studies to explore the underlying metabolic mechanisms of cancer development. To enable this, OMB develops and implements new laboratory- and bioinformatics-based methodologies, emphasizing annotation and biological interpretation of the metabolome, metabolomic data management tools, and computational metabolomics methods.
Areas of major research interest are the identification of novel biomarkers of the gut bacterial exposome and diet, including exogenous and endogenous exposures (e.g. glycation products and dicarbonyl stress, tryptophan metabolism), as well as the exploration of the role of the gut–liver axis (e.g. functionality of the protective colonic mucosal barrier, microbiome metabolism, compositional changes and dysbiosis, and bile acid metabolism) in cancer development.
OMB collaborates closely with other teams in NME, with untargeted metabolomics groups worldwide, and with a large international network of cancer and metabolic epidemiology research groups.
Team Composition
Team Leaders: Dr Pekka Keski-Rahkonen and Dr Mazda Jenab, Nutrition and Metabolism Branch (NME), IARC
Emails: KeskiP@iarc.fr; JenabM@iarc.fr
Team members:
Dr Augustin Scalbert (Scientist, NME)
Dr Chrysovalantou Chatziioannou (Postdoctoral Scientist, NME)
Dr Ana-Lucia Mayen-Chacon (Postdoctoral Scientist, NME)
Dr Mira Merdas (Postdoctoral Scientist, NME)
Dr Jodi Rattner (Postdoctoral Scientist, NME)
Dr David Achaintre (Research Assistant, NME)
Ms Vanessa Neveu (Research Assistant, NME)
Ms Nivonirina Robinot (Research Assistant, NME)
Ms Sally Moldan (Secretary, NME)