Epidemiology and transversal research

In addition to general medical activities within the department of virology of the Bordeaux Pellegrin Hospital, our team is involved epidemiologic studies and translational researches. In parallel to regular SANGER sequencing, we developed state of the art sequencing technics [ultra-deep pyrosequencing (UDPS)] that are also used in basic research projects. This expertise is used to monitor the emergence of resistance mutations associated with treatment failures  (Laboratoire certifié OMS) but also to study HIV-1 evolution over time and locations. For example, we studied the prevalence of CRF06_cpx in Algeria (Abdellaziz A et al. AIDS Res Hum Retroviruses. 2016 PMID:26529365), HIV-1 diversity among patients in Brazil and in Aquitaine (Alves BM et al. Front Microbiol. 2019 PMID:31024510; Tumiotto C et al. AIDS Res Hum Retroviruses. 2018 PMID:29439582) leading to the discovery and characterization of a novel variant, CRF98_cpx (Recordon-Pinson P et al. AIDS Res Hum Retroviruses. 2018 PMID:29947242).

Development of a vaccine

The Provir/Latitude 45 project was initiated by Pr. Hervé Fleury in 2011 and is funded in part by MSDAvenir.

The aim of this study was to identify conserved HIV-1 CTL epitopes to develop a curative vaccine in patients  according to their HLA alleles A and B. The study group was composed of patients close to primary infection and under suppressive HIV therapy from Bordeaux and latter on extended to patients from Montreal (Papuchon J et al. PLoS One. 2014 PMID:24964202). To access to minority variants data, we improved our analysis using NGS technology on proviral DNA (Tumiotto C et al. PLoS One. 2017 PMID:28934310). Thanks to a collaboration with Brazilian colleagues, we managed to design a multi-epitope CTL vaccine (Tumiotto C et al. PLoS One. 2019 PMID:30811489) that is currently tested by ELISpot (enzyme-linked immunospot) assay using samples from HIV infected patients under antiretroviral therapy (Fleury H et al. Viruses. 2020 PMID:33167335). Finally, we showed that the specific CTL epitopes expressed in plasma are conserved in the gut compartment (Recordon-Pinson P et al. Gut Pathog. 2021 PMID:33757563).