Prof Gerald Spaeth

Dr. Gerald Spaeth currently holds a Research Director position at the Institut Pasteur in Paris heading the Unit Parasitologie moleculaire et Signalisation (ParSig). He carried out his PhD at the Institut Pasteur in the laboratory of Dr. Mary Weiss establishing the transcription factor HNF4 as a master regulator of hepatocyte differentiation. After graduating from University Paris 7 in 1997 he conducted a three-years postdoc at Washington University Medical School St. Louis in the laboratory of Dr. Steven Beverley, where he genetically validated the parasite glucoconjugates LPG and PPG as important virulence factors for macrophage and mouse infection. He obtained his first faculty appointment in 2001 at the NYU Medical School, investigating the interaction of Leishmania LPG with the host CD1d glycolipid-antigen presenting pathway. After his return to Institut Pasteur in 2005 as a junior group leader and promotion to Unit Head in 2011, he established a highly visible translational research program combining proteomics, High Throughput sequencing, and functional genetics analyses to gain insight into basic mechanisms that govern Leishmania differentiation and evolution. The main research projects of his Unit apply systems-level approaches to identify Leishmania signaling pathways implicated in environmental parasite adaptation and pathogenicity, and to validate components of these pathways as potential target molecules for the development of novel anti-leishmanial strategies. Dr. Spaeth was Scientific Director of the FP7 LeishDrug consortium, and currently coordinates the LeishRIIP network, the LeiSHield consortium and a national consortium on anti-leishmanial drug discovery termed ANR-TransLeish. Starting in 2016 he will coordinate an International Mixed Unit with partner labs at IP Korea and IP Shanghai that combines approaches of molecular parasitology, immunology, and phenotypic high throughput screening to target pathways of host-parasite interaction for drug discovery.