Mario Pende
Biographical sketch:
After a PhD work in the George Thomas laboratory (Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland), Mario Pende moved to Université Paris Cité and was awarded the INSERM AVENIR contract in 2002, and became tenured PI in 2007. He received the ERC-starting and consolidator grants in 2008 and 2014, respectively. Since 2025, he will be the Coordinator of the Marie Curie Doctoral Training Network on Metabolic Control of Cell Growth by mTOR (MENTOR).
Mario Pende has been interested in how signals from nutrient availability are transduced in the cell to impact growth and ageing responses, including cell size, cell proliferation, senescence, protein synthesis and metabolism. His main achievements in this field are the following:
1) discovery of nutrient activated enzymes controlling cell size (Pende et al., Nature, 2000; Ohanna et al., Nature Cell Biol., 2005; Aguilar et al, Cell Metabolism 2007)
2) identification of metabolic alterations in senescent cells (Barilari et al., EMBO J., 2017; Tighanimine et al., Nature Metabolism, 2023)
3) involvement of these molecular mechanisms in human diseases, such as cancer, cyst formation, epilepsy and rare overgrowth syndromes (Panasyuk et al., Nature Communications, 2012; Liang et al., J Exp Med, 2014; Bonucci et al., Nature Communications, 2020)
