Muriel Thoby-Brisson wins “Equipe FRM” award

Congratulations to Muriel Thoby Brisson who has just been awarded the Equipe FRM 2024 label with her team “Development and Neurobiology of Neural Networks (DN3)”, which she co-directs with Grégory Barrière, at INCIA.

She thus joins the three other teams to receive this distinction in 2024.

Project: Pathophysiological alterations in respiratory function underlying the Central Congenital Hypoventilation Syndrome (CCHS): search for treatments

Breathing is a vital function that is generated and controlled by several interacting neuronal networks located in the brainstem and whose ontogenesis and functional emergence occur during early stages of development to ensure survival at birth. Consequently, any anomalies in these developmental processes will necessarily have dramatic and potentially life-threatening consequences. This is the case in the Central Congenital Hypoventilation syndrome (CCHS), a rare genetic disease characterized by a severe hypoventilation, an abnormally high occurrence of apneas and a loss of central chemoreception. These respiratory defaults are lethal, currently no pharmaceutical treatment exists and survival necessarily requires constraining mechanical ventilation through tracheotomy.

Using a well-established rodent model for CCHS, we propose a research project aiming at identifying one or several classes of molecules with potential therapeutic interests in alleviating CCHS-associated breathing deficiencies and defining their key targets in the central nervous system. To achieve these goals, we will combine pharmacological treatments with functional and anatomical investigations of respiratory networks, from the level of individual neurons to the integrated behavior, from embryonic to post-natal ages, with both in vitro and in vivo approaches that we already master.

Altogether, the data collected will provide important information on the fundamental neuronal mechanisms that require targeting in treating the respiratory deficits associated with CCHS.