Robin de Flores, researcher in neuroimaging within the Neuropresage team, received the Joël Ménard 2024 Prize. This award of the French Alzheimer Foundation honours his research for a better understanding of the mechanisms of the Alzheimer’s disease, which affects around 900,000 people in France.

What are the stakes of your research?

I work on identifying precisely the major mechanisms involved in the Alzheimer’s disease. What facilitates neuronal degeneration? How does the lesions spread in the brain during the disease? High-resolution imaging is very useful to answer these questions: this technique allows to reveal what is going on in one’s brain. This is the approach I use to study two specific cerebral regions affected very early by the disease: the hippocampus, the core of the memory located in the median temporal lobe, and the locus coeruleus, located in the brain stem. Understanding what happens very early, in the premises of the disease, is the key to improve the care of patients and increase our lucks to cure the disease.

What led you to neuroimaging?

I was always interested in neuroimaging! Besides, my career is atypical. Unlike my colleagues, who usually attend  medical, biology or psychology programmes,  I attended a technical degree in Physical Measures and a vocational bachelor’s degree in Image Acquisition and Processing at the University of Caen Normandy. At first, I was really attracted to technical aspects; only after did I choose master’s degree in Biology. I went on with a thesis supervised by Gaël Chételat, now director of the Neuropresage team. Then I flew to the city of Philadelphia in the United States where I performed a two-year post-doctoral contract: I had the chance to work with a cutting-edge team in neuroimaging focused on the Alzheimer’s disease. During this contract, I learned new skills including the ex vivo approach. This approach is rarely used in France and is carried out on brains that were donated to science. I brought this approach back home to the Cyceron centre in 2020. This is a real added value to our team and our research.

What does the Joël Ménard Prize mean to you and your team?

This prize is a great honour to me: application was accepted by an international jury composed of scientists whose work I fully respect. This annually awarded prize by the French Alzheimer Foundation will provide great visibility to our work in France. I insist on saying our work, because even if this is a personal prize, it still rewards a the dynamic of a whole team. On the long term, this recognition is encouraging for our research. The idea is to keep building a team around my projects to make them bigger and to think bigger here, in Caen.

Discover Robin de Flores’s research in a video realised by the French Alzheimer Foundation: