[CRBS Seminar] Intrinsic and innate immune defense mechanisms against SARS-CoV-2

Caroline Goujon studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure-Lyon (France), and did her PhD in Andrea Cimarelli’s team, where she studied the restriction of HIV-1 infection in myeloid cells and discovered that HIV-2 protein Vpx was able to counteract a restriction factor (later on identified by others as SAMHD1).

After gaining her PhD in 2007, she joined Prof. Michael Malim's group at King's College London (UK) in 2008 and was awarded a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship to initially study primary T cells responses to HIV-1 infection. She became interested in the interferon-induced restriction of HIV-1 and identified MX2 (or MxB) as one of the main players. In 2014, she was awarded the Andy Kaplan prize, which honors the accomplishments of a postdoctoral scientist in the retrovirology field. In 2015, she moved back to France and started her own lab at the CNRS/Montpellier university co-funded IRIM institute (Institut de Recherche en Infectiologie de Montpellier), thanks to the support of an INSERM tenure position and a CNRS/INSERM (ATIP-Avenir) starting grant. Using major pathogenic viruses as models, Caroline studies the innate cellular defense mechanisms against viral infections and was awarded an ERC StG in 2017 to pursue her work.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, her team has been mainly focusing on studying the interplay of host cells and respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A virus. She has just been awarded an ERC CoG to study this interplay in primary airway epithelia.