PhD MEng MSc BEng BSc

Dr. Marc-Emmanuel Dumas is Lecturer in Systems Biomedicine. He studied in France and qualified as an Engineer in Agronomy (MEng, Ingénieur Agronome) in 1998 with two MSc in "Biochemistry & Genetics" and "Applied Physiology", before being awarded a PhD in "Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology" in 2002.

Dr. Dumas was appointed as Lecturer in Systems Biomedicine at Imperial College in 2009 to develop novel research avenues in the field of metabonomics and integrative systems biology, targetting cardiometabolic diseases.

Dr. Dumas had an appointment as first class CNRS scientist at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where he started a metabonomics and systems biology group and was awarded a Young Investigator Award from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche. 

Dr. Dumas initially joined Imperial College as a Wellcome Trust Research Associate in 2002 to coordinate the metabonomics team of the £5M Wellcome Trust-funded Biological Atlas of Insulin Resistance consortium (BAIR). 

Dr. Dumas is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Proteome Research, published by the American Chemical Association.

 Awards

• Young Investigator Award, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, 2007.

Teaching

Dr. Dumas teaches in several courses, including:

• Internal Courses at Imperial: (MBBS/BSc 6-yr course, undergraduate Medicine), BSc in Biomedical Sciences, BSc in Pharmacology & Translational Medicine, MRes in Biomedical Research.

• External short courses run by the Biomolecular Medicine section.

Funding

Dr. Dumas' lectureship in sponsored by Nestlé, with additional funding from EC-FP7 and Institut Mérieux. During his CNRS appointment at ENS-Lyon, Dr. Dumas was awarded a Young Investigator Award from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR Jeune Chercheur) and several other ANR grants, as well as INCa and INERIS grants and he also received joint funding from industry (Bruker).

Membership of societies

• Member of The Royal Society of Chemistry (MRSC)
• Member of The Society of Biology (MSB)
• Member of The British Toxicology Society
• The Metabolomics Society, member
• The Metabolic Profiling Forum, member and conference chair of Metabomeeting 2008 in Lyon, France, organised by the MPF

Research Interests

Dr. Dumas’ research interests include metabolomics, quantitative genetics and network biology, more specifically integration of metabolomic data with other "omics" (transcriptomics, proteomics, genome polymorphism and metagenomics) to identify metabolites and genes associated with pathologies related to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome e.g. type 2 diabetes, obesity, dyslipidemia, atherosclerosis, hypertension, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, but also ageing and cancer. This functional integration of "omics" sciences identifies candidate drug targets for mechanistic validation.

Dr. Dumas’ contribution to insulin resistance research was the identification of a gut microflora – related metabolic phenotype (or “metabotype”) in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Methylamines (monomethylamine, dimethylamine, trimethylamine and trimethylamine-N-oxide), a class of microbial metabolites derived from dietary choline-containing compounds, are associated with the development of insulin resistance, and more specifically non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. This observation on gut microbial metabolism brought an independent confirmation of several previous findings in metagenomic projects from a metabolic point of view. Methylamines are now thought to be involved in other insulin resistance related pathologies such as atherosclerosis. 

In terms of systems biology modeling, Dr. Dumas is one of the pioneers in the field of Metabotype Quantitative Trait Locus (mQTL) Mapping and Metabolome-wide Genome-Wide Association Studies (i.e., metabolomic GWAS), by integrating genome-wide polymorphisms with metabolome-wide quantitative variation. Dr. Dumas now develops the concept of microbiome-wide metabolome-wide association studies (MW²AS), combining High-Throughput Sequencing and Metabolic Profiling technologies. Dr. Dumas has also developed a keen interest in knowledge visualization and integration of metabolic signatures with protein-protein interaction networks (interactome), and recently introduced a new approach to understand the regulation of metabolic patterns, by mapping metaoblic networks onto protein-protein interaction networks: integrated metabolome and interactome mapping (iMIM). He joined the UK PPI network (ppi-net.org).

Dr. Dumas introduced the concept of "Metabolomics-on-a-chip", i.e. the hyphenation of bioartificial organs based on microfluidic biochips with metabolic profiling technologies, and pioneered applications for in vitro predictive systems toxicology and pharmacology.

Within the Biomolecular Medicine Section at the Department of Surgery and Cancer, Dr Dumas is research theme leader for “Nutrition, Microbiome & Metabolic Syndrome”, and for "Quantitative Genetics and Network Biology of Metabolic Profiles”.

Dr. Dumas’ lectureship is sponsored by Nestlé. He coordinates the Nestlé - Imperial College Research Alliance, a £1.5M strategic research consortium targeting the modulation of metabolism and weight management by the gut microbiome.

Dr. Dumas was/is also involved in the following key research consortia:

• UPCOMING: EC-FP7: Metagenomics and Integrative Systems Medicine of Cardiometabolic Diseases (MetaCardis 2013-2017)
• EC-FP7: European large-scale functional genomics in the rat for translational research (Euratrans: http://www.euratrans.eu/ 2010-2014)
• EC-FP7: The role of intestinal gut microflora in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (Florinash: http://www.florinash.org/index.html 2010-2013)
• ANR: A metabolomic approach for QTL mapping in animal models of insulin resistance (mQTL, 2008-2012)
• ANR: Systems Biology and environmental toXicology (SysBioX, 2007-2011)
• EC-FP6: Molecular Phenotyping to Accelerate Genomic Epidemiology programme (MolPAGE, http://www.molpage.org 2004-2008)
• EC-FP6: Functional GENomic diagnostic Tools for Coronary ARtery Disease programme (FGENTCARD http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/fgentcard/ 2007-2010)
• Wellcome Trust: Biological Atlas of Insulin Resistance consortium (BAIR, http://www.bair.org.uk 2002-2007)

Selected Publications

• Davidovic L, Navratil V, Bonaccorso CM, Catania MV, Bardoni B, Dumas ME*. A metabolomic and systems biology perspective on the brain of the fragile X syndrome mouse model. Genome Res, 2011;21(12):2190-202.
• Nicholson G, Rantalainen M, Li JV, Maher AD, Malmodin D, Ahmadi KR, Faber JH, Min JL, William Rayner N, Toft H, Krestyaninova M, Viksna J, Guha Neogi S, Dumas ME, Sarkans U, Donnelly P, Allen M, Zondervan KT, Spector TD, Nicholson JK, Lindon JC, Baunsgaard D, Holmes EC, McCarthy MI, Holmes CC and MolPAGE consortium. A genome-wide metabolic QTL analysis in Europeans identifies functional effects of two loci shaped by recent positive selection. PLoS Genetics 2011;7(9):e1002270.
• Nicholson G, Rantalainen M, Maher AD, Li JV, Malmodin D, Ahmadi KR, Faber JH, Hallgrímsdóttir IB, Barrett A, Toft H, Krestyaninova M, Viksna J, Neogi SG, Dumas ME, Sarkans U, The Molpage Consortium, Silverman BW, Donnelly P, Nicholson JK, Allen M, Zondervan KT, Lindon JC, Spector TD, McCarthy MI, Holmes E, Baunsgaard D, Holmes CC.  Human metabolic profiles are stably controlled by genetic and environmental variation. Molecular Systems Biology 2011;7:525.
• Dumas ME*. The microbial-mammalian metabolic axis: beyond simple metabolism. Cell Metabolism 2011;13(5):489-90.
• Blaise BJ, Giacomotto, J, Elena B, Dumas ME, Toulhoat P, Segalat L, Emsley L. Metabotyping of Caenorhabditis elegans reveals latent phenotypes. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 2007; 104: 19808-12. Listed as “Hidden Jewel” by Faculty of 1000 Biology.
  
• Dumas ME, Wilder SP, Bihoreau MT, Barton R, Fearnside J, Argoud K, D’Amato L, Wallis RH, Blancher C, Keun HC, Baunsgaard D, Scott J, Sidelmann UG, Nicholson JK, Gauguier D. Direct quantitative trait locus mapping of mammalian phenotypes in diabetic and normoglycemic rat models. Nature Genetics. 2007; 39: 666-672.
• Dumas ME*, Barton R, Toye A, Cloarec O, Blancher C, Rothwell A, Fearnside J, Tatoud R, Blanc V, Lindon J, Mitchell SV, Holmes E, McCarthy MI, Scott J, Gauguier D, and Nicholson J Metabolic profiling reveals a contribution of gut microbiota to dietary-induced fatty liver phenotype in mice. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2006; 103: 12511-12516.
• Martin FP, Dumas ME, Wang Y, Legido-Quigley C, Yap IKS, Tang H, Zirah S, Cloarec O, Murphy GM, Lindon JC, Sprenger N, Fay LB, Kochhar S, Holmes E, Nicholson JK. A molecular systems biology view of microbiome-mammalian metabolic interactions in a mouse model. Molecular Systems Biology. 2007; 3: 112.

Patents

• "Biological signatures", 2002.
• "Metabolomics-on-a-chip", 2011.

Group members

• Dr. Julien Chilloux (Postdoc in Cell Metabolomics, Imperial 2012-2013)
• Dr. Quan Gu (Postdoc in Bioinformatics, Imperial 2011-2013)
• Ms. Claire L. Boulangé (PhD student in Nutrimetabonomics, Imperial 2010-2012)
• Mr. Mohd Badrin Hanizam Abdul-Rahim (PhD student in Cell Metabolomics, Imperial 2012-2014)
• Ms. Magali Sarafian (PhD student in Nutrimetabonomics, Imperial 2011-2014)

• Ms. Chloé Deshayes (BSc student in Food science, 07/2011-12/2011)
• Ms. Océane Carle (BSc student in Food science, 07/2011-12/2011)
• Ms. Elisa Noll (MRes student in Biomedical Sciences, Imperial, 2011-2012)
• Ms. Jaya Venkitachalam (MRes student in Biomedical Sciences, Imperial, 2011-2012)
• Mr. Kyrillos Georgiadis Adesina (MSc student in Human Genetics, Imperial 03/2010-08/2011)  

Upcoming positions