Gustave Roussy is one of the world’s foremost cancer research hospitals and comprehensive cancer centers, working at the cutting edge of therapy development while treating more than 50,000 patients each year.
Fondation Gustave Roussy supports the growth of research at the Institute with one central objective: advancing scientific innovation for the benefit of people living with cancer. By helping accelerate discoveries, foster medical excellence, and bring new treatments closer to patients, the Foundation plays a vital role in translating research into real-world impact.
Friends of Fondation de France has partnered with Fondation Gustave Roussy since 2023, supporting its fundraising efforts in the United States to help advance the Institute’s ambitious goal of developing treatments for 80% of cancer patients by 2040.
In this interview, we spoke with Dr. Laurie Menger, Head of the Advanced T-Cell Therapy Group at Gustave Roussy, to better understand what it takes to develop bold new cancer therapies, and how international philanthropic support helps make this progress possible.
Can you tell us a bit about your role at Gustave Roussy and what you focus on?
I lead the Advanced T-cell therapy group here. I’m a scientist by training from Inserm, the national researcher entity, and we’re working on T-cell biology. We want to understand T-cells, but we also want to identify the limiting factors they have to survive in the tumor microenvironment.
T-cells are the soldiers of the immune system. They can recognize the tumor cells and they can very effectively kill them. They are white blood cells that we can reprogram with gene editing tools, and this is what we do in the lab.
We have developed a genome-wide CRISPR screening approach. It’s a systematic approach to test every gene of the genome and identify the main genes that are limiting T-cell immunotherapies, with the goal of targeting them and making the T-cells more potent in the tumor microenvironment and effectively recognize and maintain long-term activity by genetic engineering.
We test all the genes of the genome at the same time to find the ones that are holding back the T-cells.
What first drew you to this area of cancer research, and what continues to motivate you?
I think it’s the beautiful complexity of immunology and immuno-oncology specifically as well. It’s an area where you can use the body’s own self-defense, the immune system, to really fight disease.
With these new tools you can engineer them, and this is really motivating—to get your hands on these fantastic tools, and the latest translational tools. We can fill a gap because when you have a fundamental question on immunology, you often need the tools to answer this question. With these tools we can answer the question and we can make a drug—a living drug—that is a T-cell therapy, being more specific, more efficient, and persisting longer as well.
It’s true that working with these tools is an ultimate driver—to see the limitation becoming an answer.
How does your lab’s research move from the laboratory into real-world treatments?
We start with an immunological question and then we apply this genome-wide CRISPR screening approach. Once we have a candidate, we engineer patient-derived T-cells and test if in vitro we can empower the T-cell with functionality and persistence.
If that’s the case, we move to preclinical models. We assess persistence, functionality, and safety. Then the successful approach can later go for a GMP—Good Manufacturing Practice—process, where you produce the T-cell therapy in this GMP process. That can then go to early phase clinical trials here at Gustave Roussy.
We are also launching academic cellular therapy clinical trials here, where we’re going to make our own CAR T-cells. All together this is a great ecosystem, and it does accelerate the research.
From your perspective, what makes Gustave Roussy such a unique and powerful environment?
Gustave Roussy is a comprehensive center where you really have close interaction. We have meetings several times a week where I can discuss with clinicians.
In the morning we discuss a biological question, and in the afternoon I can go back to the lab and try to meet this clinical need specifically for patient needs.
As the biggest cancer center in Europe, we have fantastic state-of-the-art facilities—genomics, animal facilities, cell manufacturing. It’s a bench-to-bedside approach that is only doable here because we have this huge research center integrated within the clinical center. We are interacting physically and intellectually all the time. That’s the great specificity of Gustave Roussy.
Cancer research is increasingly international. How do global collaborations help accelerate discoveries, particularly between France and the U.S.?
Global collaboration is key—it’s essential. Cancer is a very complex disease that is also evolving. We need to mobilize the best minds and all the unique resources that we have.
We currently have a partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital. It’s a co-supervised PhD program. They came to us because of our technology—we were the first in Europe to develop this genome-wide CRISPR screen in T-cells. They wanted to learn about it, but we also benefit from having extremely well-trained collaborators.
It’s a real exchange. We move together. This accelerates discovery because we have the best people working with the best technology. You can validate findings across diverse populations, tackle larger questions, and drive innovation much faster and more efficiently.
In the lab we have people from India, China, the U.S., and France. That’s the cool thing about science. We are just driven by the same will. We understand each other because we speak the same scientific language. We live in this specific world driven by discovery.
What does international philanthropic support mean to you and your team?
International philanthropy is vital. It provides more flexible, risk-tolerant funding. With this type of funding, we can pursue more ambitious projects or bold ideas that would not be funded through classical grant applications.
We could acquire new equipment, hire talented postdocs, or launch pilot projects—new, sometimes crazy ideas that could lead to a breakthrough but would not yet have enough preliminary data for traditional funding.
It provides agility. High risk, high gain goes together. It’s flexibility that allows us to design innovative projects. It can also reinforce partnerships between countries—you trust joint missions and move together toward innovation.
What gives you the most hope about the future of cancer treatment?
I want to engineer a cure. It’s no longer science fiction to imagine that in the next decade we will have very efficient cellular therapies for different still-untreatable cancers.
We are also developing off-the-shelf therapies. Therefore we could also provide cellular therapies that are more affordable, more potent, that can touch a larger public.
Accessible, durable and less expensive as well. This is a big deal for every country.
This is my hope: to deliver a long-term remission to some of the still untreatable cancers with cellular engineering, but also with drugs now tackling the main limitation which is the T-cell exhaustion, the lack of persistence and long-term functionality of T-cell therapy.
Advancing Cancer Research Through French-American Philanthropy
U.S.-French collaboration continues to offer many powerful opportunities for cancer treatment development and research acceleration. This spirit was recently on display on March 27th at the Transatlantic Exchange in Oncology, co-hosted by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and held this year in Boston.
Bringing together leading researchers from both sides of the Atlantic, the meeting highlighted emerging advances in epigenetic therapies, microbiome-driven immunity, and cellular reprogramming, fields that are rapidly reshaping how cancer is treated.
Dr. Laurie Menger, who served as a moderator and speaker, contributed to discussions on next-generation T-cell engineering. These exchanges underscore how U.S.-French partnerships help translate and disseminate cutting-edge research and key findings in the field.
Yet transatlantic support for cancer research goes beyond academic and institutional partnerships. As Gustave Roussy continues to push the boundaries of cancer research, international philanthropy plays an increasingly essential role in accelerating discovery.
Since the launch of its partnership with Friends of Fondation de France, the institute’s Foundation has seen growing engagement from American donors, a reflection of the shared understanding that cancer is a global challenge requiring collective action across borders.
For Fondation Gustave Roussy, this transatlantic support not only helps meet expanding research needs but also reinforces a powerful idea: scientific and medical excellence can unite an international community committed to improving outcomes for patients everywhere.
“Philanthropic contributions from the United States have a direct and immediate impact,” explains Anne-Sophie de Boissard, Director of Development at Fondation Gustave Roussy. “They allow us, for example, to invest more rapidly in cutting-edge equipment, fund ambitious research programs from their earliest exploratory phases, support scientific teams and emerging talent, and accelerate the implementation of innovative clinical trials.”
This flexibility enables researchers to pursue bold ideas and transform promising discoveries into therapeutic solutions faster, ultimately benefiting patients worldwide.
To learn more about Fondation Gustave Roussy and how you can support its life-saving work through Friends of Fondation de France, visit their page on our website.
