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Olivier Terrier, chercheur CNRS au Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie à Lyon, est l’un des contributeurs d’un ouvrage qui vient d’être publié avec le CNRS aux éditions Cherche Midi : L’ère des pandémies : Covid, les avancées de la recherche. Retour sur le chemin parcouru par les scientifiques depuis l’apparition du covid il y a quatre ans.

Release today of a collective work dedicated to COVID-19, published by Le Cherche Midi, in which I had the pleasure of contributing.

Has the world entered a new epidemic era? What does science have to say? For several years now, scientists have been warning of the emergence of new diseases and the influence of environmental and social factors on health.  

COVID-19 and the health crisis it provoked have precipitated a new awareness of the dangers posed to humanity by viruses, coronaviruses and other variants. In this book, researchers, physicians, biologists and epidemiologists set out to tell the “natural history of this disease”: to recount its pandemic history and the questions it has raised, to understand viruses and coronaviruses, their differences, their location, their modes of transmission and the risks of crossing species, to take stock of the mechanisms of infection, replication and the notions of mutation and recombination. Beyond the polemics, the book takes stock of advances in research into this type of disease, as well as vaccination to protect against it. An essential review of a pandemic that has often been treated more on its medical and health aspects than on its scientific ones. This is a major contribution by scientists to the general public, enabling us today to better measure the risks of this new pandemic era, and to provide keys to protection against it.

Le Cherche Midi Publisher, produced with the CNRS, the Institut écologie et environnement (INEE) and the Institut national des sciences biologiques (INSB). Collective work edited by Florence Débarre, Agnès Mignot, Serge Morand, Françoise Praz. Foreword by Arnaud Fontanet

At our last journal club (8 December 2023), we discussed two very interesting manuscripts: One concerns the determination of a ‘core’ signature specific to a viral infection and its exploitation in a diagnostic approach in the saliva of patients (Yang et al. mBio 2023), the second concerns antiviral innate immune memory in macrophages following infection by SARS-COV-2 (Lercher et al. BioRxiv, 2023). The programme therefore includes plenty of ‘omics’ as well as virus/virus confection!

Yang Q, Meyerson NR, Paige CL, Morrison JH, Clark SK, Fattor WT, Decker CJ, Steiner HR, Lian E, Larremore DB, Perera R, Poeschla EM, Parker R, Dowell RD, Sawyer SL. Human mRNA in saliva can correctly identify individuals harboring acute infection. mBio. 2023 Nov 9:e0171223. doi: 10.1128/mbio.01712-23. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 37943059.

Alexander Lercher, Jin-Gyu Cheong, Chenyang Jiang, Hans-Heinrich Hoffmann, Alison W. Ashbrook, Yue S. Yin, Corrine Quirk,Emma J. DeGrace, Luis Chiriboga, Brad R.Rosenberg, Steven Z. Josefowicz, Charles M. Rice
Antiviral innate immune memory in alveolar macrophages following SARS-CoV-2 infection. bioRxiv 2023.11.24.568354; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.11.24.568354

For the past three years, I had the privilege of being part of the Steering Committee of the National Research Programme “Covid-19” (NRP78) of SNSF Swiss National Science Foundation, whose summary report is published today.  It has been a fascinating experience, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with the NRP78 team under the guidance of Marcel Salathé. 

I learnt a lot, and I really enjoyed being able to follow the progress of the different NRP78 projects. I would like to congratulate all the research teams involved in this programme, who have carried out high-quality work and contributed to a better understanding of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.

If you would like to learn more about this programme’s results in terms of recommendations and scientific output, do not hesitate to consult the synthesis report.

The activity of sialic acids, known to play critical roles in biology and many pathological processes, is finely regulated by a class of enzymes called sialidases, also known as neuraminidases. These are present in mammals and many other biological systems, such as viruses and bacteria. 

In a review just accepted for publication in Frontiers In Microbiology, we focused on co-infections at the level of the respiratory epithelium, the scene of multiple functional interactions between host, viral and bacterial neuraminidases. This topic illustrates the complexity of respiratory co-infections that need to be further explored through multidisciplinary approaches. Strategies targeting or mimicking the activity of neuraminidases could be a very interesting avenue for the development of treatments for bacterial superinfections.

Reference: Escuret V, Terrier O. Co-infection of the respiratory epithelium, scene of complex functional interactions between viral, bacterial, and human neuraminidases. Front Microbiol. 2023;14. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2023.1137336. 

Our collaborator, Loïc Guillot (CRSA Saint-Antoine) will present our work on the characterisation of SARS-CoV-2 in different physiological-pathological contexts (CF, COPD) “Divergent molecular responses of bronchial epithelium to SARS-CoV-2 infection in relation to pre-existing respiratory disease state”.

Kylian Trepat will present a poster presenting the work he participated in during his Master 2, under the supervision of Sophie Assant ” Comparison of immunogenicity and protection in HCWs primed with ChAdOx-1-S or BNT162b2 after one or two doses of mRNA booster”

https://www.cell-symposia.com/Viruses-2023/

Save the date!

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that we will organize, in partnership with the German network FluResearchNet, a joint symposium, from 4 to 6 October, in Lyon. This symposium, whose program is under preparation, will be an opportunity to exchange on the different topics related to human and animal influenza viruses in a friendly atmosphere. A call for abstracts will be issued soon, we count on you!