Studying the Long-Term Consequences of an Infection

One of the [other papers I want to talk about] is the work that was published in I think 2005 in Cell by Denise Fonseca. Denise Fonseca was a remarkable doctoral fellow in the laboratory and what she did is a very interesting paper, which I think today resonates even more than it used to and I'm going to tell you what the paper was about. The paper was to try to understand what happened when you have an acute infection, what happened to the mechanism in your own body to be tolerant to food or to the microbiome, or what happened to the long-term consequence of an infection. What she did was to utilize a model of acute infection and was able to show that this one single episode of acute infection can permanently remodel tissue and can block the acquisition of oral tolerance to food, in fact triggering allergy and inflammation in the gut.

Opening this Field of Investigation

I love this paper because first it brings so many different stories and elements we have done in the past as one convergent story, but also it opened the door to what we called infection sequelae, which is the fact that infection can have long-term consequences and we call that immunological scar. Today, post-COVID tells us that this was indeed the reality, that acute infections have dramatic long-term consequences, but at the time this concept was actually not there and I think Denise has really contributed to opening this field of investigation and really to use mechanism to explain how an infection can actually create long-term inflammatory consequence for the host. This one was in 2005.

Yasmine Belkaid is a renowned scientist whose research focuses on the relationship between microbes and the immune system. She is the President as well as the head of the Metaorganism laboratory at the Institut Pasteur.

Belkaid earned her Master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Science and Technology Houari Boumediene in Algiers, and a Master of Advanced Studies (DEA) from Paris-Sud University. In 1996, she earned her PhD in immunology from the Institut Pasteur, where she studied innate immune responses to leishmania infection. Belkaid then moved to the United States for a postdoctoral fellowship in intracellular parasite biology at NIAID’s Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases (NIH).

Belkaid has received numerous awards including the Robert Koch Prize, the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences, the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur Prize, and the AAI Excellence in Mentoring Award. She also serves on the committees of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the Microbiome Technical Advisory Group at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the NIH Anti-Racism Steering Committee, the American Society of Microbiology, and the Genentech Scientific Resource Board.