Pasteur in Brazil will be strategic for emerging viruses – 04/24/2023 – Health

Zika, dengue, malaria, chikungunya and yellow fever are diseases known as arboviruses, transmitted by mosquitoes, which can have serious consequences for those infected and for the public health system.

In common, in addition to the vector involved in the transmission being an insect (mosquito), they have a high incidence in Brazil, making the country strategic for research on emerging viral diseases, according to the director of the Institut Pasteur in France, Stewart Cole.

“Brazil is a large country with the greatest source of biodiversity on the planet. There are many public health problems in the country associated with its position [em desenvolvimento] but also with human intervention in the environment, such as, for example, changes in the behavior of the vectors that transmit malaria due to deforestation,” Cole said in an interview with Sheet.

At the end of March, the centennial French research institute signed an agreement with USP (University of São Paulo) to create the first Pasteur laboratory in the country.

The partnership between USP and Institut Pasteur has existed since 2016, when the Pasteur-USP platform was created. The evolution of the scientific agreement into a new institute brings more financial support, greater longevity of research projects and the hiring of researchers directly associated with Pasteur in its host country.

“Brazil has a tradition of excellent quality biomedical research, not only by Brazilian scientists, but also by the collaboration with foreign researchers. In this sense, the new Pasteur headquarters in São Paulo will bring even more advances”, stated the director.

The focus of this and other laboratories provided for in the agreement will be on infectious diseases, such as zika, chikungunya and even Covid-19, something that the platform was already developing. In addition to supporting research that improves diagnostic tests and possible vaccines for prevention, Pasteur has a special interest in research on the development of babies who have microcephaly syndrome after their mothers are infected with the zika virus.

According to Cole, the integration of the new Pasteur unit into a collaborative network with 30 other laboratories around the world will make it possible to identify new outbreaks and epidemics.

“The area of ​​epidemic prevention research is something that today the whole world is focused on. Pasteur’s branch at USP can play a fundamental role in intelligence by detecting firsthand an outbreak of zika or even a virus that was completely unknown in the country, placing the institute in a privileged position to investigate and try to offer solutions”, he said.

In addition to emerging diseases, another area of ​​interest for the institute (and which has cooled down at the moment due to the more favorable situation of the pandemic) is Covid-19. At the beginning of the pandemic, the institute was at the forefront with research on diagnostic tests and the development of therapies based on monoclonal antibodies to treat the disease.

The network made up of Pasteur and other Brazilian institutes will also work on genomic sequencing of virus variants, to detect a new strain as soon as it enters circulation. Cole says that the world’s expectation is that Covid will not return to the levels of the first two years of the pandemic, but that it is important to be prepared if cases rise again, which is why the institute will continue with genomic analyzes of the virus.

Another front of action for the institute in São Paulo will be on neurodegenerative diseases, such as dementia, Alzheimer’s and the hearing loss associated with them, and also understanding the genetic causes of autism spectrum disorder.

“The Institut Pasteur has been investigating for at least two decades the diseases that affect the functioning and development of the brain, leading to disorders such as depression or autistic disorder, which have grown in the number of cases diagnosed in recent years.”

In this sense, the relationship between viral infections and neurodegenerative diseases, such as microcephaly due to zika virus, is one of the main focuses of research.

“There is also an expectation that the laboratory located in São Paulo will act in this research area in a creative and innovative way, considering the epidemiological scenario in Brazil”, he concludes.

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Sir Stewart Cole, 67

Microbiologist, he is professor of pathogenesis and microbiology at the Institute of Global Health at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (Switzerland) and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He received the “Stop-TB” award in Kochon’s partnership with the WHO (World Health Organization) for his tuberculosis research. He was director of the Strategic Technologies department and executive scientific director of the Institut Pasteur in France before becoming president of the institute in 2018.