Paola Barbara Arimondo

Full professor

email: Paola.ARIMONDO@cnrs.fr
phone: +33-186467869



Dr. Paola B. Arimondo studied Chemistry at the University of Pisa and received her Ph.D in Biophysics at the MNHN in Paris and her tesi di Perfezionamento in Chemistry at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy. In October 2001, Paola Arimondo was recruited by the CNRS and she is now Director of Research at the Institut Pasteur-CNRS UMR3523. In 2011, Paola Arimondo was recruited to lead the Laboratory of Epigenetic Targeting of Cancer (ETaC) USR3388, a joint public-private Laboratory between the CNRS and Pierre Fabre Laboratories, in Toulouse, France. In 2016, she was French oversea fellow of the Churchill College, Cambridge UK, and she joint the Institut Pasteur in 2018, where she is head of the Epigenetic Chemical Biology unit and Director of the Department of Structural Biology and Chemistry. Since January 2022, she is head of the UMR3523 CNRS-Institut Pasteur Chem4Life. Her research focuses on the interactions between nucleic acids and proteins and their modulation by small chemical molecules. Initially she developed a strategy to target at a specific DNA site a class of antitumor agents directed against human DNA topoisomerases I and II, resulting in site-specific “DNA scissors”. After a six-month sabbatical in 2005 at the University of California in Berkeley, she initiated a new project developing an innovative chemical strategy aiming at the epigenetic control of gene expression in cancers. The chemical modulators of the epigenetic regulation are also used as probes to better understand the role of DNA and histone methylation in cancer and other human diseases and identify new targets or biomarkers. Most recently she has applied the chemical targeting of the epigenetic regulation to fight infectious diseases. Paola B. Arimondo is co-author of 133 publications and of 10 patents.


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