Research Traineeship in Cellular Immunology and Infectious Diseases for Master 2 / MSc student

Subject title: Original preclinical evaluation of a vaccine candidate for the prevention of leishmaniases
Subject description:
Globally, more than 1 billion people are at risk of contracting leishmaniasis. Vaccination isproposed to be the most appropriate method to protect the world’s population from this neglected tropical vector-borne disease. Our vaccine strategy aims to provide broad global HLA coverage that would effectively respond to this public health challenge, at the request of leishmaniasis control programs, and in a manner most suited to overcome logistical difficulties in the field. In addition, this vaccine model could also be applied to the animal reservoir in a One Health strategy, as canine populations are an important parasite reservoir and threatened by this disease, in particular with 1 million dogs at risk of infection in the south of France. The main objective of the Master 2 internship is to develop an innovative functional in vitro test, which would simultaneously demonstrate the ability of the vaccine candidate to specifically stimulate and amplify human T lymphocytes (immunogenicity) and induce intracellular leishmanicidal activity in autologous macrophages infected with different Leishmania species. The internship project would contribute to the proof of concept of the immunopreventive and anti-parasitic properties of our candidate vaccine against leishmaniases.
Trainee activities
• Bibliographic studies
• Cell biology, immunology and biochemistry techniques (mainly magnetic isolation of specific immune cell populations, flow cytometry, ELISpot, ELISAmicroscopy); Parasitology techniques
• Weekly presentation of the progress of experiments and results
Skills to acquire or develop: Cellular biology, Immunology, Biochemistry, Parasitology, Bio-statistic and data management, scientific writing,
Traineeship duration: 5 months
Start date: Feb-2022
Sponsor: RIVOC (Défi Clé RIVOC « Risques infectieux et vecteurs – Occitanie », https://rivoc.edu.umontpellier.fr/) funding, including financial reward for the student (https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F32131) and lab fees.
Research organisation: Institut de Recherche pour le Développement – IRD – https://www.ird.fr/
Research unit – location : IRD – UMR177 – INTERTRYP – https://umr-intertryp.cirad.fr/
911 avenue Agropolis, BP 64501
34394 Montpellier Cedex 5, France
Supervisor: Dr. Rachel Bras-Gonçalves, e-mail : [email protected]