Last updated: August 3, 2020
Our Mission
In the battle against cancer, ECS Progastrin considers its mission as a succession of relays between Fundamental Scientific Knowledge on the one hand and "the Art and Science of Medicine" on the other.
The final relay, undoubtedly the most important, is the one that the Physician must carry out alone with his Patient, against the disease.
This is why, in order to never forget the Patient, we carry out our mission by exclusively serving Physicians with a single objective:
« To ensure that demonstrations of basic science become effective, reliable and accessible solutions, handed over to physicians for the benefit of their patients. »
Executive Team
The dream of a scientist, the fight of a woman
Dominique Joubert is a scientist with a PhD in biology, coming from academic and fundamental research in which she worked for more than 40 years, including two decades from 1991 to 2011 as Director of Research at Inserm (France) and Director of the Oncology Department of the IGF, a CNRS-INSERM-University of Montpellier Joint Research Unit.
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Contrary to scientific dogma, she has always been convinced that cancer responds to the "laws of the living" and is therefore reversible. She is therefore naturally looking for the "key" to this reversion.
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In 2003, in her laboratory, her team and herself observed a protein that needs to come out of the tumor cell and re-interact with it to exert its effects on the tumor cell.
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She believes that this protein, resulting from a set of disorders linked to the Wnt signaling pathway (highly involved in tumorigenesis), may be the key she is looking for.
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She is modeling an experiment to demonstrate that neutralizing this protein can regulate the pathway that generated it.
This approach seemed absurd to her team. Neutralizing the product of a mechanism to regulate the said mechanism, the idea is far-fetched!
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To the surprise of sceptics, the experiment is conclusive, demonstrating for the first time that the tumor mechanism can be reverted into a solid tumor.
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In a healthy individual, this protein, progastrin, is the precursor of gastrin, it is present in the G cells of the stomach, it is not found in the blood.
In a patient with cancer (any cancer to date), it is secreted by the tumor cell of the organ affected by this cancer, it is then called hPG80.
We’ve so far detected hPG80 in the blood of 83% cancer patients. Moreover, 100% of tumors produce hPG80[1].
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Dominique Joubert now knows that what has just been proven will simply change the history of cancer!
She also knows that there is another equally challenging round ahead: bringing together all the energy, resources and expertise needed to ensure that a demonstration of basic research is translated into solutions for physicians, for the benefit of patients.
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[1]. You et al, EBioMedicine, 2020 Jan;51:102574