Laurie Menger

Laurie Menger is an INSERM researcher and young group leader of the Advanced-T cell therapy team (U1015) at Gustave Roussy (GR), specialized in Onco/Immunobiotechnology. She has built her career on the use of multidisciplinary approaches to conduct immunotherapeutic projects leading to translational development.

During her PhD at Gustave Roussy, she developed high-throughput videomicroscopy screening for discovering immunogenic cell death inducers among FDA-approved drugs in Guido Kroemer’s lab. At UCL cancer Institute, she set up clinically relevant protocols to inactivate immunosuppressive molecules and strengthen adoptive T cells therapies with Sergio Quezada and Karl Peggs. In 2015, she was awarded with the John Goldman prize (Blood and Marrow transplantation British Society, UK). At Institut Curie, thanks to the prestigious MSCA fellowship, she established genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 editing of CD4 T-cell to better understand their specific regulation with Olivier Lantz. In 2019, she obtained financial support from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche Jeune chercheur (ANRJCJC) Grant and in 2021 received an ATIP-Avenir (starting package, INSERM) and Gustave Roussy starting package.

Main objectives

Her work focuses on the study of T cells biology in immunosuppressive environments through systematic and unbiased approaches to accelerate immunotherapeutic targets discovery. She is combining the latest advances in T-cell engineering, genome-scale editing technologies, metabolic and single-cell profiling in a context of therapeutic adoptive transfer against cancer. Her goal is to characterize the genes and essential parameters for the development of synthetic immunology providing a new class of effective, safe and affordable treatments for oncology.