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FG ERC

The LabEx IRON would like to congratulate François Guérard, researcher at CRCI2NA Nantes (partner of the LabEx IRON), winner of a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project SAt-Radio: Stable 211At-labeled radiopharmaceuticals for targeted α therapy.

From his thesis work (defended in 2010 in Nantes), François Guérard became interested in the chemistry of astatine, an extremely rare element which disintegrates in a few hours and which could destroy many tumors by radioactivity without damaging healthy tissue. He continued on this theme during a first post-doc at the National Cancer Institute (National Institutes of Health, United States). His return to Nantes for a second post-doc funded by the LabEx IRON (March 2014 – September 2017) allows him to persevere in exploring the chemistry of this element as well as other radioactive isotopes of interest in order to make possible their association with biomolecules for diagnostic and therapeutic applications in nuclear medicine. At the end of his two post-docs, François Guérard was recruited Research Fellow at the CNRS in October 2017.

The objective of the SAt-Radio project is to explore alternative binding modalities to C-At binding in order to develop new radiolabeling approaches with better in vivo stability. The strategies developed will exploit both the halogen and metallic character of At, using analytical and computational approaches. More information : here

This funding rewards François Guérard’s exemplary success in his area of expertise on astate-211. The excellence of its past work has enabled Nantes to place itself among the internationally recognized teams in the field of vectorized alpha therapy and in particular in the use of astatine-211.