Wolf-Hervé Fridman

Professor Wolf H. Fridman is Professor Emeritus of Immunology at the Université Paris Cité, France. He received his MD and PhD degrees from the University of Paris. After 10 years in the laboratory headed by Jean Dausset, he created his own laboratory at the Cancer Research Centre in Villejuif in 1976, then moved to Institut Curie in 1983. In 2007 he created and directed the Cordeliers Research Centre. He has been President of the Canceropole Ile de France.

Dr Fridman’s research interests have been focused around the role of the immune system in controlling human tumors and the biological functions of receptors for IgG antibodies,. He, and his team, identified the ITIM motif, an inhbitory motif common to many receptors.

He, then, focused on the analysis of the tumor microenvironment of human cancers. Since 2005, his studies have changed the paradigm of host/cancer interactions by demonstrating that the ‘immune contexture”, taking in account the functionality, the location and the density of the immune infiltrate in colorectal tumors, is the major prognostic factor for human cancers. More recently, he, and his team, demonstrated that Tertiary Lymphoid Structures (TLS) and B cells, predict favorable clinical outcome and therapeutic response to immunotherapy in cancer patients and analyzed the mechanisms underlying these impacts. These findings open the way for novel immune-based tools for efficient prognosis and therapy of cancers.