March 2019, UTC orga­nized a lec­ture on “Biol­o­gy and the func­tions of liv­ing tis­sues” with research sci­en­tists from the Mayo Clin­ic present. Dr Richard Ehman, Dr Peter Ama­dio and Dr John Hawse trav­elled to Com­pieg­ne from the Mayo Clin­ic Cam­pus in Rochester, Min­neso­ta (USA) where their sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies are con­vert­ed into ther­a­peu­tic pro­to­cols. Inter­ac­tions zoom into14 years between, UTC, Mayo Clin­ic and the CNRS. 

Co-oper­a­tion between UTC, Mayo Clin­ic and the CNRS enabled Sabine Ben­samoun, a CNRS research offi­cer sec­ond­ed to the UTC-BMBI (bio­me­chan­ics and bio-engi­neer­ing) Lab to con­tin­ue her research ini­ti­ate at the Mayo Clin­ic on mus­cle fibres and func­tion­al fac­tors and there­by to enrich the CNRS and UTC in regard to the new tech­niques she learned there. Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in thins coop­er­a­tion also allowed the CNRS and UTC to devel­op a unique knowl­edge base in ana­lyz­ing mus­cle tis­sues and to receive inter­na­tion­al recog­ni­tion. “This know-how is now dis­sem­i­nat­ed in var­i­ous clin­ics and lab­o­ra­to­ries round the world. I am high­ly grate­ful to Drs Ehman, Ama­dio and Hawse who have tak­en on their per­son­al time to come over here to tell s more about their research fields and I’m also very hap­py that UTC and the CNRS were able to attend these very high lev­el pre­sen­ta­tions”, she adds wit­ness­ing the March 11, 2019 lec­tures giv­en at the UTC Inno­va­tion Centre. 

Several years at Rochester (MN, US) for our Picard scientist

Sabine Ben­samoun her­self is a prod­uct of the Mayo Clin­ic Foun­da­tion (Rochester, MN, USA), a world ref­er­ence in med­ical research. The years she spent there turned her into the sci­en­tist she is today? “I enjoyed an excep­tion­al train­ing scheme and I can only under­score the high qual­i­ty fea­tures. One point I recall espe­cial­ly was that when we were devel­op­ing pro­to­cols and when the results were not sat­is­fac­to­ry, the sup­port, the encour­age­ment, the pres­ence of a team, a fam­i­ly at the dif­fi­cult times” she con­cludes. “I shall always remem­ber the con­stant, pos­i­tive spir­it, pick­ing you up, pulling you all the way, all the time. As a high-lev­el ath­lete I know what these val­ues mean and her they are very close to the world of research”. 

---

RESEARCH WITH GUARANTEED APPLICATIONS AND MARKETS

If a mus­cle is “ill” because of a pathol­o­gy, or shows sports-induced dam­age, the tech­niques that have been devel­oped enable us now to mon­i­tor the sit­u­a­tion and adapt the treat­ment accord­ing­ly. There are mul­ti­ple pos­si­ble appli­ca­tions and mar­ket out­lets: med­ical domain (elas­to­graph­ics for face and leg mus­cles…), the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sec­tor (links between the TIEG gene and cer­tain mus­cu­lar patholo­gies (using mus­cu­lar feed­back data to sim­u­late walking/ambulation modes and to mod­el mus­cu­lar behaviours).