10.09.2012

Prof. Sébastien Gagneux, head of the Tuberculosis Research Unit, has been awarded with an European Research Council (ERC) 2012 "Starting Grant".

Gagneux will receive 1.5 million EUR for a project entitled “Compensatory Evolution and Epistasis in Multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis”. The ERC's mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-initiated frontier research across all fields of research, on the basis of scientific excellence. The ERC Starting Grants scheme targets promising researchers who have the proven potential of becoming independent research leaders

Prof. Sébastien Gagneux is an SNF Professor at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) since 2010. Born in 1969 in Basel, he graduated after studying at the University of Basel in 2001 and went, as postdoctoral research fellow, to Stanford University and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle (USA). He subsequently led for three years a research program at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London.

The five years ERC-funded research project will allow Gagneux’s group to investigate the globally increasing issue of multi-drug-resistance tuberculosis (MDR-TB).


The project combines experimental evolution and fitness assays in vitro and in human macrophages with population-based molecular epidemiological studies and genome sequencing analyses of bacterial isolates collected prospectively in Georgia, a country with a high burden of MDR-TB. Moreover, inclusion of RNAseq based transcriptomic investigations in this work will shed new light on the biology of MDR-TB, including the role of small RNAs, and the identification of novel compensatory mechanisms and epistatic interactions between drug resistance-conferring mutations involved in the emergence and transmission of MDR-TB. Through its multidisciplinary nature, this project will simultaneously test predictions derived from ecological theory and experimental models, generate new insights into the biology and epidemiology of MDR-TB, and ultimately contribute to the control of one of humankind’s most devastating infectious diseases.

 

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