Valerie Taly

After graduation as a Molecular Toxicologist, Dr Taly (Abecassis) performed her PhD research at the Center of Molecular Genetics (CNRS, Gif-sur-Yvette, France) on applications of combinatorial methods (generally used for proteins directed evolution) to the study of the functional plasticity of human Cytochromes P450. She joined Andrew Griffiths™ group in 2003, in the Medical Research Council in Cambridge (UK), to work on in vitro compartmentalization of biological and chemical reactions in emulsion droplets and participated to the development of High-throughput selection procedures of double-emulsions by FACS. In 2005, she integrated the Laboratory of Biological Chemistry directed by Prof. Andrew Griffiths in the ISIS institute (University de Strasbourg) as a permanent CNRS researcher in 2005 to work on HTS procedures using droplet-based microfluidics. Since 2008, she develops droplet-based digital procedures for Cancer diagnosis.

Recently, her team developed a highly sensitive quantitative procedures for the detection of Cancer Biomarkers in droplets in a collaboration involving the clinical laboratory of Prof. P. Laurent-Puig (European Georges Pompidou Hospital, University Paris-Descartes), the team of Dr J.-C. Baret (Max Plank Institute) and Raindance Technologies (US). She has recently initiated (July 2011) a new Group, named Translational Research And Microfluidics (TRAM), within a clinical oncology research unit in the university Paris-Descartes. Her research is dedicated to the clinical validation of the developed droplet-based procedures for the non-invasive detection of Cancer biomarkers, the highlighting of new Cancer Biomarkers and the development of original tools and procedures for their detection with applications in personalized medicine, cancer recurrence detection and cancer diagnostics.