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The teams

The Bioinformatics Center of the Synergie Lyon Cancer Foundation places its expertise and human and technological resources at the service of the structure and interpretation of cancer genomic data.

Vincent Le Texier, Database mananger

Bioinformatics center

The mission of the research engineer Vincent Le Texier is that of creating and developing databases able to organise the huge amount of genomic and clinical information processed at the bioinformatics platform of the Synergie Lyon Cancer Foundation.

Vincent Le Texier is mainly responsible for creating and developing databases, which will be sent as a French contribution to the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) in Toronto, as part of an international project on cancer genomics. “A database is used to pool and organise information in a single computer unit”, Vincent Le Texier explains. “It allows for the recordkeeping of the entire datasets, their up-date and their examination”.

Databases established to provide intelligent answers to biological queries 

Upon arrival at the bioinformatics platform, in 2010, as part of the ICGC project, Vincent Le Texier designed a database (“SampleTracker”) ensuring the traceability of cancer tissue biopsies, DNA and RNA of patients provided by the hospital centres: “Via an internet interface, collaborators are able to know at any given time the state of advancement of the analyses of their biological samples. This database, though rather modest in the amount of data it contains, is quite valuable from a functional point of view”. Currently, Vincent Le Texier is developing two other databases as part of the same project, one for the data on genomic modifications (individual variations, insertions/deletions, chromosomal rearrangements…) obtained from analyses conducted at the platform, the other for clinical data on patients, including the date of the diagnostic, the type of treatment and the response to treatment, the risk factors and the medical history. He then created a software to enable scientists to gain access to the two databases and obtain answers to genomic, epidemiological and clinical queries: “It will soon be possible to carry out cross-referencing, for example between the clinical profile of patients and a particular type of cancer”.

Between the years of 2000 and 2002, Vincent Le Texier did a Diploma of Higher Specialised Studies (“Diplôme d'études supérieures spécialisées” or DESS) in bioinformatics at the University of Rouen. For the period of his studies, he did a training course in the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry. He, particularly, designed a database to categorise therapeutic targets and a software to label genes of interest in silico. During the six years after that, he worked as a bioinformatics specialist and a software engineer at the European Bioinformatics Institute (“Institut Européen de bioinformatique”) in Cambridge, UK. He took part in the ATD (The Alternate Transcript Diversity) project, a genomic database pooling all of the information available on the alternative transcripts, specific types of proteins responsible for producing messenger RNA, “signals” sent by genes. He joined the bioinformatics platform of the Synergie Lyon Cancer Foundation, after having worked for a year as a computer consultant for several businesses.