Dr
Curie, France
Sarah Watson is a clinician scientist at Institut Curie, specialized in medical oncology and translational sarcoma research and genomics.
Since the beginning of her medical studies, Sarah Watson has been enrolled in an MD, PhD program and rapidly decided to focus both her clinical and research work on sarcoma and rare malignancies. During her PhD under Olivier Delattre’s supervision, she was deeply involved in a major transcriptomic analysis and classification of a cohort of small round cell sarcoma by RNAseq, which led to the identification of several new molecular sarcoma subtypes and provided clues of specific gene signature among distinct groups of tumors. She also spent a year in Dr. Amatruda’s lab (University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center, Texas, USA), to successfully establish transgenic models of different fusion-associated sarcoma subtypes in zebrafish.
Sarah Watson‘s research projects are organized around three main axes, all of which combining direct patient characterization using next-generation sequencing technologies, and molecular and cell biology validation in in vitro and in vivo models : 1) molecular classification of sarcomas and other rare malignancies 2) intra-tumoral heterogeneity in dedifferentiated liposarcoma and undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma, 3) cellular origin of sarcoma and organization of mesenchymal differentiation in human tumors.
Since 2021, Sarah Watson has been awarded the “Marie Curie Chair for Translational Research in Sarcoma”, and several prizes including the “Prix Gallet et Breton” from the French National Academy of Medicine.
