Amélie Fradet-Turcotte

Professor Amélie Fradet-Turcotte is a full professor at Université Laval and a researcher at CHU de Québec-Université Laval Research Center since 2015. Prof. Fradet-Turcotte did her postdoctoral studies at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, and she holds a PhD in biochemistry from Université de Montréal.

As a Ph.D. student in the laboratory of Jacques Archambault at the Institut de Recherches Clinique de Montréal (IRCM), she studied how replication of oncogenic viruses impacts the biological processes of the host cell. She then pursued her interest in understanding how external stress shapes cellular behaviour by joining the team of Daniel Durocher in Toronto. There, she unravelled the molecular mechanisms that are central to the repair of DNA breaks, a process that is essential to maintain genomic stability in cells.

As a Canada Research Chair Tier II in Molecular Virology and Genomic Instability, her research interest is in understanding the regulation of the molecular processes that safeguard our genetic material in infected cells as well as the consequences of their deregulation on cancer development.

As a holder of the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Molecular Virology and Genomic Instability, Prof. Fradet-Turcotte’s research interests focus on understanding the regulation of molecular processes that protect our genetic material in normal and infected as well as the consequences of their deregulation on the development of cancer. Her research team uses a combination of biochemistry and cellular and molecular biology techniques to determine how DNA repair processes are regulated at the chromatin level, how viral infection by DNA viruses such as HPV affects different signalling and DNA damage repair pathways and how these processes affect the resistance of cancer cells to chemo- and radiotherapy treatments. Their work has notably highlighted new regulatory factors for DNA damage repair (Science Advances 2023), how usurping damage signalling proteins by HPV impacts the genomic stability of the host (PNAS 2019) and the molecular mechanisms that lead to the inhibition of these pathways by the human Herpesvirus type 6B virus (EMBO Reports 2024).

Several types of DNA damage threaten the integrity of our genome daily. When these alterations are not repaired appropriately, they can not only result in the acquisition of characteristics found in cancer cells such as translocations and somatic mutations but can also lead to cell death. Prof. Fradet-Turcotte’s research will have an impact not only on our understanding of the mechanisms that regulate the stability of our genome but also on our understanding of the biology of cancers caused by viral infection such as cervical cancer. uterus and oropharynx (caused by HPV).