SFI 2019

Éric Vivier, DVM, PhD, is Professor of Immunology at Aix-Marseille University and at the Public Hospital of Marseille. Prof. Vivier was appointed Scientific Director of Innate Pharma, a biotechnology company dedicated to improving cancer treatment with innovative therapeutic antibodies that exploit the immune system.
Eric Vivier is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Maisons-Alfort and received his PhD in Immunology from the University of Paris XI. He completed his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School, then joined Aix-Marseille University as professor at the Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML) in 1993 before becoming its director from 2008 to the end of December 2017.
He is also one of the founders of Marseille-Immunopôle, an immunology cluster created in 2014 linking fundamental and therapeutic research, innovation and industrial development in the Aix-Marseille region.
Eric Vivier's work focuses on the functioning of Natural killer lymphocytes (NK) and other innate lymphoid cells (ILCs). Professor Vivier has published nearly 300 scientific articles and is on the list of the most cited researchers (https://clarivate.com/hcr/).
A laureate of the European Research Council (ERC advanced grants), a member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine and the Institut Universitaire de France, Prof. Vivier has received several awards including those from the Ligue Nationale contre le Cancer (1996, 2004 and 2013) and the European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS, 2004).
He is also a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.

Nicolas Manel is group leader at Institut Curie. Since 2010, his lab at Institut Curie is interested in the basic principles that operate at the intersection between innate immunity and viral replication, and their impact on adaptive immunity. Some of the main achievements of his lab include the discovery of a Trojan horse mechanism of immune signal transmission by viral particles (Gentili et al., Science 2015) and the identification of NONO as an essential innate sensor of the HIV capsid in the nucleus (Lahaye et al., Cell 2018).

Mihai Netea was born and studied medicine in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He completed his PhD at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, on studies investigating the cytokine network in sepsis. After working as a post-doc at the University of Colorado, he returned to Nijmegen where he finished his clinical training as an infectious diseases specialist, and where he currently heads the division of Experimental Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Nijmegen University Nijmegen Medical Center. He is mainly interested in understanding the factors influencing variability of human immune responses, the biology of sepsis and immunoparalysis in bacterial and fungal infections, and the study of the memory traits of innate immunity. He is the recipient of the Spinoza Prize 2016, and an ERC Advanced grant in 2019.

Andres Hidalgo studied Biology at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and obtained his PhD degree in Immunology and Molecular Biology in 1999. After a postdoctoral stay at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine (New York), in the laboratory of Paul Frenette, he established his group at Fundación CNIC in Madrid. His research program encompasses various aspects of innate immune and stem cell biology that aim to understand how these cells preserve tissue function.

Claude Leclerc is Professor at the Institut Pasteur. Since the creation of her Unit in 1987, she had focused her research in vaccinology and particularly on the development of new vaccine strategies, based on our knowledge of how immune responses are induced and regulated. She had contributed to the development of synthetic adjuvants, synthetic peptide vaccines and of several novel antigen delivery systems. Her team had developed several therapeutic cancer vaccines under clinical development, in particular for breast cancer.

Behazine Combadière is a director of research (DR1) at INSERM and head laboratory “Skin, Immunity and Vaccination” at the Center for Immunology and Microbial Infections (CIMI-Paris, France). She is the former deputy director of CIMI-Paris INSERM unit 1135. After adPhD in Immunology in 1993 (Paris, France) on the regulation of HIV-specific CD8 responses, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda (MD, USA) until 1997 where she studied the role of variability of antigen on the quality of T cell responses. She obtained a permanent position at CNRS from 1998 to 2007 and became director of research (DR2) at INSERM in 2007 and DR1 in 2017. She has a large expertise in Vaccinology and immune memory to infectious diseases. She also has a large expertise in skin immunization with the development of Transcutaneous immunization using hair follicle targeting method. She coordinated the FP7 European project CUT’HIVAC (Cutaneous and mucosal HIV vaccination) and has been awarded by FRM (Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale). Currently, she is involved in H2020 European aids vaccine initiative (EAVI2020) project for the development of HIV vaccine candidates. She is also co-director of International Vaccinology courses of Institute Pasteur of Paris and member of advisory boards related to new vaccination strategies against viral infectious diseases.

Isabelle André, PhD, is a research director at INSERM and head of the Lympho-Hematopoiesis Laboratory at Imagine Institute. With her team, she has identified key steps in the production of T lymphocytes, key players in imunity. Her work culminated in the development of an artificial, patented thymus, tested in a clinical trial to reduce the period of immune deficiency after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in patients with Severe Combined Immune Deficiency. Her team also identified new genes involved in severe forms of inherited immune deficiency in children and demonstrated the genotoxicity of some anti-viral drugs, such as AZT, used to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child.

Arne Akbar obtained his BSc from Kings College London and his PhD from the University of Southampton. He performed his early Postdoctoral studies at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre and Cornell University Medical College in New York. He then returned to the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London. He is currently Professor of Immunology in the Division of Infection and Immunity at UCL His research has focussed on the understanding of T cell dysfunction, and how this may be reversed during ageing. Professor Akbar’s work involves studies at the interface between academia, industry and clinical practice. He is internationally recognized for his studies on mechanisms that control the differentiation and senescence of human T lymphocytes. His group was also one of the first to identify human regulatory T cells. He was closely involved in the development of Basilizximab (Simulect), used for the prevention of acute solid organ graft rejection (Akbar is a joint patent holder) that has been used to treat ~300,000 patients. His group have also developed cutaneous recall antigen challenge models in humans for the study of immunity in vivo that have been adopted by academic an biotech researchers worldwide. His research group consists of basic scientists and clinicians facilitating the translational aspects of his work. The benefit of this combination is exemplified by the award of a highly competitive multidisciplinary MRC Experimental Medicine Grant (Akbar PI) to investigate whether blocking p38MAP kinase in older humans in vivo enhances their responses to recall antigen challenge in the skin. Prof. Akbar has a wide national and international collaborative network, with universities and research organisations in the UK, Europe, the United States and Singapore.

Dr. Luciana Berod studied Biochemistry with a focus on molecular Immunology and microbiology at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. She moved later to Germany, where she obtained her PhD in Immunology from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. She is a research group leader at TWINCORE in Hannover, a joint venture between the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) and the Hannover Medical School (MHH). Dr. Berod´s work gained international acclaim for her discoveries on how immune cell metabolism influences the immune response. She showed that the development of Th17 cells depends on the novo fatty acid synthesis, and that inhibition of this pathway has therapeutic potential in autoimmune diseases and GvHD. Lately, she published new studies on how fatty acid metabolism influences other immune cell subsets such as Tregs or Dendritic Cells.

After completing medical school in Zürich and Lausanne, Dr. Hess trained for his M.D. and Ph.D. at Basel University in Switzerland and obtained his clinical education in Basel and at Imperial College in London. For post-doctoral work he moved to Boston, Massachusetts where he investigated mechanisms of T cell migration. His current position is Professor of Medicine at the University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland, and Professor of Experimental Medicine at the University of Cambridge, UK. Dr. Hess’s research is focused on translational aspects of lymphocyte function and its metabolic basis. The goal of his work is to understand patients suffering from disorders of immunometabolic regulation.

Agnes Lehuen is director of the department “Endocrinology, Metabolism and Diabetes” and head of the laboratory “Immunology of diabetes” at Cochin Institute and University of Paris. She is cofounder of the Laboratory of Excellence INFLAMEX. She did her PhD in Paris, a post-doctoral training in the USA and got a CNRS position at Necker hospital in Paris. Since 2002 she is team leader and in 2014 her laboratory joined Cochin Institute. Dr Lehuen research has been focused on autoimmunity and more recently she has broaden her interest on metabolic diseases.

Thomas Pradeu is a CNRS Senior Investigator in Philosophy of Science embedded in the Bordeaux immunology lab (ImmunoConcept), where he coordinates an interdisciplinary group associating philosophers and scientists. He is also the PI of an ERC Starting grant and the coordinator of the Institute for Philosophy in Biology and Medicine. His recent contributions include The Limits of the Self (paperback 2019), “Why science needs philosophy” (PNAS, 2019), “Philosophy of Biology: Immunology and individuality” (eLife, 2019), “Beyond the Tumor Microenvironment” (IJC, 2019) and “Towards a General Theory of Immunity?” (Trends Immunol., 2018).