Principal investigator

Guillaume Sandoz is First Class Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS, and Principal Investigator of the Biology of Ion Channels (BIC) lab at the Institute of Biology Valrose (iBV) in Nice, France (http://ibv.unice.fr/research-team/sandoz). After obtaining a PhD Neuroscience from the Aix-Marseille University, he joined the Lazdunski and Lesage Labs (2004-2009) in Valbonne first as a postdoc then as CNRS researcher (permanent position of “Chargé de Recherche”). In this lab, he has been working extensively on the regulation of the leak potassium current, carried by the Two-Pore-Domain channels K2P, which regulates neuroexcitability (Sandoz et al., EmboJ, 2006, Sandoz et al., J. NSci, 2008, Feliciangeli*, Bendhaou*, Sandoz* et al., Cell 2007 *Cofirst). In 2009, he has been selected by the US program for international exchange to join UC Berkeley as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. In Berkeley, in the group of Pr. Isacoff, he discovered a new family of ion channel which represents the missing ling in the evolution of Glutamate receptor (Janovjack*, Sandoz* and Isacoff, Nature Com., 2011 *Cofirst), worked on several aspects of the K2P pharmacology— and most notably, he discovered the molecular mechanisms underlying activation K2P channels by GABAB receptors (Sandoz et al., PNAS 2011, Sandoz et al., Neuron 2012). Back in France in 2012, he applied and got the French ATIP AVENIR grant allowing him to start his lab in 2013 at the iBV. The lab focusses on the neuroexcitability under normal and pathological conditions. The lab made several important fonadamental as well as clinical and technical). The Sandoz lab notably has notably question the specificitydogmatic specificity of the subunit comoposing protein compelxes as well as the ion channel classification (Avalos Prado et al., Cell 2021, Comoglio et al., PNAS 2014, Levitz et al., PNAS 2016). The work on neruoexctiability studies under pathologic condition led the lab to decipher the molecular mechanism underlying migraine and to describe a new mechanism called fsATI that explain transmission of inherited disease (Landra—Willm et al., Nature Com. 2003, Avalos Prado et al., iScience 2021, Royal et al., 2019 Neuron). Furthermore, the research of the lab may have clinical applications notably with the development of strategies to treat migraine, pain, dry eye syndromes and cystic fibrosis but as well as industrial applications by notably the development of an important assay to remote control instantaneously and reversibly pain with light in freely moving animals from worms to mammals without surgery of genetically manipulation which allows analgesic high throughput drug screening in vivo on worms before hits validation in mammals.