The challenges of modern medicine include a variety of diseases with a slow onset, where a success of treatment depends on early diagnostics, which in its turn relies on the knowledge of early mechanisms of disease. These diseases include cancer, neurodegenerative and autoimmune diseases. They also represent a challenge to modern society, as their treatment is a heavy financial burden on public health systems. Therefore, the understanding of early mechanisms of these diseases is particularly important for the success of treatment and for development of new drugs. Some of the early mechanisms of cancer, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases are similar, eg mutations and translocations in immunoglobulin genes may provoke both autoimmune diseases and cancer. Therefore, cooperation between laboratories working on these subjects may provide new insights into early mechanisms of these diseases.

The present GDRI "From Molecular to Cellular Events in Human Pathologies" project joins together French, Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian and Armenian scientists working on fundamental and applied aspects of molecular and cell biology of cancer, neurodegeneration and autoimmune diseases. 20 scientific projects will be developed in these fields thanks to a strong collaboration between 30 teams from forefront institutions in each countries including those in charge of medicine (INSERM for France, the Blokhin Russian Cancer Research Center and the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences for Russia as well as the Riga Faculty of Medicine for Latvia). The project " From Molecular to Cellular Events in Human Pathologies " represents a novel and exciting step to reinforce and foster a very successful CNRS-GDRI that began 5 years ago based on collaborations between French and Russian laboratories