The Immune System of Pregnancy

First, I'm closing my lab in the [United] States right now, so there are a lot of projects that are wrapping up and we are restarting a laboratory here.

The big theme that we want to develop in the lab, and it may go in different direction, is today very much centered around this maternal child dyad and in particular the very poorly understood immunity of pregnancy. I think it's something that remains incredibly poorly studied in the world. Science and the deciders were not women and this incredible moment that is really the one where everything will be decided for the future remains a gigantic enigma. In fact, we know almost nothing of the immune system of pregnancy. We know nothing about the consequence of inflammation on the immune system of the offspring and we know nothing about how certain infection or very few certain infections, classical one, the one that try and go to the placental barrier, but the one that do not, we don't understand the consequences. So, I think there is a huge amount of work that remains to be done, very fundamental, in humans and experimentally, to understand how pregnancy develops, how the immune system is evolving during pregnancy and repairs when it's needed to do.

Blind Spots in Research

[Our understanding of the immune system of pregnancy is] like a black hole of knowledge. How could we know so much about the minutia of this and so little about the primordial thing that makes us human? I think sometimes it's fascinating to [about] how those blind spots of research and I think that's what I always say to student and postdoc, just ask questions that haven't been asked before because there are so many. Don't go where everybody is, I mean who cares about competition? Do something different. There are so many important questions that we have not answered that we have no answer for and I think, definitely, the maternal child dyad is one of these gigantic fields that has a huge amount of space for many scientists that remains necessary for investigation.

Thinking About the System

Of my research currently, what I love about it is the ecology of it, thinking about the system. It's not always being consumed by the question, but being able to extract yourself and think about this incredible ecological perspective of the question you asked. I love this aspect of immunology. Immunology is very much a field that allows you to bridge other fields and to think about systems.

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.