Every day in the section "Daily sores", Europe 1 takes stock of the benign pathologies that many French people have already contracted.
But Wednesday, on the occasion of Pasteurdon, we look back on the history of the Pasteur Institute.
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Every day in the section "Daily sores", Europe 1 examines the benign pathologies that many French people have already contracted. But once is not custom, Wednesday, on the occasion of Pasteurdon 2020, it is the origins of the Pasteur Institute that will interest us: what is its vocation? And what diseases are researchers working on today?
Originally, the promotion of vaccination against rabies
Louis Pasteur is a famous chemist and biologist who was initially interested in fermentation.
He has implemented a treatment on certain foods to prevent them from being contaminated by microbes: this is pasteurization.
But today he is best known for his discovery of the vaccine against rabies, as told by Dr. Christophe d'Enfert, scientific director of the Institut Pasteur.
"The work he carried out on the rabies virus that could not be seen at the time - microscopes at the time could not see the viruses - made it possible, by successive cultures on rabbit marrow, to attenuate the rabies virus and thus to be able to propose a vaccination implemented initially in a child ".
Thus in 1888, he created the Pasteur Institute to promote vaccination against rabies.
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Infectious diseases and neuroscience
Since then, there has been other research and there are around thirty Institut Pasteur in the world.
Nearly 30,000 doctors, researchers and epidemiologists work on infectious diseases or viruses such as malaria, Ebola influenza, HIV, but also other diseases, in particular everything that derives from neuroscience.
"Teams are working on perception, in particular hearing. We will really strengthen our research on this subject. We are working on autism, we are working on schizophrenia, we are working on addictions ...", explains Christophe d 'Hell.
Mobilization around the Covid-19
Currently, the Institute is obviously mobilized in the face of the Covid-19 epidemic.
About fifty teams have been working there for months to both manufacture serological tests and develop vaccines.
Three projects are also underway there.
And then, as its scientific director explains, the Institut Pasteur is also trying to find new drugs.
"Can we target certain proteins of the virus with new molecules? Can we target proteins of cells that are infected by the virus and thereby prevent the virus from multiplying? We are working on the looking for so-called therapeutic antibodies that could also be used to prevent the virus from entering cells. "
To give researchers the means to discover these new treatments, it is possible to make a donation on the Pasteurdon website or by phone at 36 20.