Alexandre Fagnan

My research focuses on the understanding of the molecular mechanisms driving hematopoietic lineage fate decision in both normal and malignant hematopoiesis.

The regulation of hematopoietic lineage development involves synergistic and antagonistic interactions between transcription factors with lineage-restricted expression patterns, both through protein-protein interaction and direct transcriptional activation. These protein-protein interactions enable the assembling of transcriptional complexes, including direct chromatin binding, epigenetic and scaffolding factors at both promoter and cis-regulatory element but also driving chromatin looping and therefore orchestrate global chromatin conformation.

I completed my PhD in Thomas Mercher’s lab (Gustave Roussy Institute, France) in 2020, working on human erythroid leukemia. Then, I moved to Oxford and joined the Nerlov lab as a postdoctoral researcher.

My current project aims to characterize the molecular mechanisms underlying the erythroid-myeloid lineages segregation and how these mechanisms are hijacked in malignancies including myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN). To this aim, I use both molecular tools (e.g. RNA-seq or ATAC-seq) and functional approaches with transgenic mice model at bulk and single-cell level.

I hope this piece of work will bring new insight in our understanding of hematopoietic lineage regulation and potentially identify new therapeutic strategies.