Marc DALOD

Dr Dalod is heading a team at the Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML) in Marseille, France. His investigations are mainly focused on understanding which combinations of dendritic cell (DC) types and activation states promote protective antiviral or anti-tumor immunity, and how. He trained for Ph.D. under the supervision of Drs. Elisabeth Gomard and Jean-Gérard Guillet, at Cochin Hospital, in Paris, France, from 1996 to 2000, studying CD8+ T cell responses to human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). He discovered that anti-HIV-1 CD8+ T cell responses appear to be delayed and blunted during primary infection as compared to responses described against acute infections with Epstein-Barr virus or Measles virus (Dalod et al. J Clin. Invest. 1999). He hypothesized that HIV-1 infection was compromising the cross-talk between innate and adaptive immunity. He joined the laboratory of Pr. Christine A. Biron (Brown University, Providence, RI, USA) to perform his post-doctoral training examining the role of DCs and natural killer cells in antiviral immunity in mice, from 2000 to 2002. There, in collaboration with Giorgio Trinchieri, Carine Asselin-Paturel and colleagues (Schering-Plough, Dardilly, France), he contributed to the discovery and first in vivo functional study of mouse plasmacytoid DCs (pDCs) (Asselin-Paturel et al. Nat. Immunol. 2001; Dalod et al. J Exp Med. 2002; Dalod et al. J Exp Med. 2003). In 2003 he joined the CIML where he has been leading a team since 2004. He contributed to pioneer the use of comparative genomics to align immune cell types across tissues and species (Robbins et al. Genome Biol. 2008; Crozat et al. Immunol. Rev. 2010). He uses this strategy to identify conserved gene modules instructing the ontogeny and functional polarization of DCs, and to increase the likelihood of translation to other vertebrate species of the discoveries made in the laboratory mouse model (reviewed in Vu Manh TP et al. Front Immunol. 2015). This work has been largely performed in collaboration with Dr. Isabelle Schwartz-Cornil for animal species of agronomical interest and with Drs. Anne Hosmalin for humans and non-human primates. He was the first to demonstrate the equivalence of DC types between mice and humans, which in particular contributed to put under the spotlight the DC type specialized in efficient cross-presentation of cell-associated antigens (Robbins et al. Genome Biol. 2008; Crozat et al. J Exp Med. 2010), now named type 1 conventional DCs (cDC1), and their major role in orchestrating protective immunity against viral infections and tumors (Alexandre et al. J Exp. Med. 2016; Cancel et al. Front Immunol. 2019; Hubert et al. Science Immunol. 2020; Mattiuz et al. preprint https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.23.424092; Ghilas et al. preprint https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.28.424621). He developed the first effective protocol for the in vitro differentiation of hematopoietic stem cells into large quantities of the three main types of DCs present in human blood and secondary lymphoid organs including cDC1; with the discovery of the critical role of Notch signaling in promoting cDC1 differentiation (Balan et al. Cell Rep. 2018). These discoveries have already had a major impact to facilitate the application to humans of discoveries made by studying mouse dendritic cells, including the manipulation of DCs for vaccination or immunotherapy. Recently, he characterized for the first time the activation trajectory of pDCs in vivo during a viral infection; and demonstrated that the same pDCs first produce IFN-I/III and then acquire an increased ability to present antigens and activate T cells via a transcriptomic convergence to cDCs (Abbas et al. Nat Immunol. 2020). His research has attracted definite attention in the Immunology community, with an index of 47; a total number of citations >10,000; an average citations per paper ~78; eight dominant author papers cited >100 times each and 4 highly cited papers published in the last 10 years (source: Web of Science; see https://publons.com/researcher/3439053/marc-dalod/publications/).