Monaco versus glioblastoma: two PhD theses funded by GEMLUC
The Groupement des Entreprises Monégasques pour la Lutte contre le Cancer (GEMLUC) funded two doctoral theses at the Centre Scientifique de Monaco (CSM). The topic — high-grade malignant brain tumours: glioblastomas and some embryonal tumours, among the most aggressive and hardest to treat. The funds were handed over on 16 September 2025.
🏛 Who’s paying: businesses pooling funds for oncology
GEMLUC — Groupement des Entreprises Monégasques pour la Lutte contre le Cancer, an association of Monegasque businesses fighting cancer. Its scheme is peculiarly simple: companies in the principality pool money, and the collected funds go directly to research organisations, without intermediaries. For a country the size of a city district, this works better than a state grant machine: donors and scientists know each other personally.
GEMLUC has been working with the Centre Scientifique de Monaco for almost ten years — as noted by Monaco Hebdo, which reported on the new contribution in October 2025. The handover of the donation itself is described by Pages Monaco: it took place on 16 September 2025.
🔬 Who is researching: the “Stem Cells and Brain Tumours” team
The money will go to a CSM group called “Stem Cells and Brain Tumours” (Cellules souches et tumeurs du cerveau). It is led by Dr Vincent Picco, the centre’s research director. The group’s focus is not decorative: the CSM publication list includes, for example, a paper on ferritin as a vulnerability of brain tumours (Segui, Parks, Vucetic, Picco — Cell Death & Disease).
🧠 Why these tumours were chosen
High-grade brain tumours are a case where medicine hits a wall. Both the CSM and GEMLUC describe them the same way: highly aggressive, limited survival and, crucially, a large number of tumours that do not respond to existing therapy. Glioblastoma is the best-known example here; embryonal tumours are less well known but no less severe.
That is the remit for the two theses: not to tweak existing protocols at the margins, but to understand what exactly makes these tumours resistant, and to build new diagnostic and treatment approaches on that knowledge — primarily via radiotherapy.
⚕️ What the Princess Grace Hospital has to do with it
The work will be carried out in partnership with the radiotherapy department of Princess Grace Hospital (CHPG). This is a principled point: the laboratory component remains at the CSM, the clinical perspective is at the hospital, and both parties are presented as equal partners, not as client and contractor. Both organisations emphasise interdisciplinarity — for a topic where oncology, neurosurgery, radiotherapy and molecular biology collide, this is no formality.
We wrote about how the principality is organised around such institutions in the piece on the Grimaldi Forum; about the less obvious side of Monegasque science — in the article on the Princess Antoinette Park.
🎓 Betting on people, not equipment
The most interesting thing about this contribution is what it does not fund. Not a scanner, not reagents, not lab renovations. It funds two doctoral theses — that is, people: two PhD students get the opportunity to work on a single topic for several years without being distracted by fundraising.
“This partnership project is a principled step in supporting research and in training the scientists of tomorrow,” says GEMLUC president François Brych. Picco is more cautious about outcomes: the team hopes “to contribute to a significant advance in the treatment of brain tumours”, primarily by means of radiotherapy, and to improve patients’ quality of life. There are no timelines or promised protocols in the statements — and that is perhaps the best sign that this is real scientific work, not a press release.
Monaco has been investing in such initiatives for years: the principality is steadily building a reputation as a place where money sits close to science. Another recent example is the principality’s housing programme, planned through 2040.
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