Pascale Zimmermann's Biography

Pascale Zimmermann, Directeur de Recherche, Inserm

Pascale Zimmermann is a pharmacist and completed her PhD degree at the Christian de Duve Institute at U.C.L Belgium. She subsequently trained and held research positions in Belgium, Austria and France. She currently holds her main research activities at the Centre de Recherche en Cancérologie de Marseille & Institut Paoli-Calmettes in France. Her scientific interests are to reveal how membrane-associated scaffold proteins and lipids participate in cell signaling and multicellular organization/homeostasis. She provided major contributions to our understanding of the importance of membrane trafficking for the biology of heparan sulfate proteoglycans, the role of phospholipids in the function of PDZ proteins and more recently the molecular mechanisms of exosome biogenesis. The originality and importance of her work was acknowledged by the Royal Academy of Medicine Belgium award and the EMBO young investigator program. Her current focus is to clarify the role of syndecan-PDZ molecular networks in extracellular vesicle function and diversity, the role of the syntenin pathway (a viral-like exosomal pathway) in tumor-host relationships during leukemia progression and relapse, and to contribute to the rational development of small chemical inhibitors of PDZ proteins.