Scientific topics
Keywords
ITMO
Arnaud Moris PhD, Eng
Course and current status
Arnaud Moris, Research Director at CNRS, is heading a research team at the CIMI-Paris. He was trained as an engineer in biotechnology at the Ecole Supérieure de Biotechnology de Strasbourg (France). He worked at British Biotech (UK) on the production of recombinant proteins and at Toronto’s Hospital for sick Children (Canada) before enrolling in the PhD program of the University of Tübingen (Germany). In the Dpt. of immunology, directed by Prof. Hans-Georg Rammensee, he used innovative tools to study the molecular basis of graft rejection. He then joined the team of Prof. Olivier Schwartz at the Pasteur Institute (France) to study the interactions of HIV-1 and the immune system.
Arnaud Moris is now a recognized leader in the field of Immunology and Virology. He is heading a team dissecting the initiation of adaptive immune responses by dendritic cells. He developed the tools and expertise to study the basic aspects of viral antigen presentation. He is contributing through national and international programs to the characterization of novel vaccine candidates.
Scientific summary
To fight infections, a tight coordination of innate and adaptive immunity is crucial. Viruses, such as HIV-1, Measles and CMV, have evolved means to manipulate host responses and in particular affect the functions of dendritic cells, which coordinates these two arms of immunity.
Our work, at the interface between immunology and virology, focuses on the interactions between viruses and antigen presenting cells, e.g. dendritic cells, macrophages and B cells. We characterize the cellular pathways involved in the presentation of viral antigens to CD4+ and CD8+ T cells and define potential escape mechanism developed by viruses. Our current work focuses on:
- Studying the role of autophagy in viral replication (including HIV, MeV and CMV) and antigen presentation.
- Defining novel sources of viral antigens from alternative reading frames: The example ASP, HIV-1 Antisense protein.
- Dissecting the interactions of B cells and T follicular helper (Tfh) cells in HIV-1 infection.
- Characterizing novel vaccine candidates.
Our research program benefits from local, national (ANR and ANRS) and international collaborations (EU FP7 and USA)
