The 2010 L Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences to Bruno Lemaître
Our warm congratulations to Bruno Lemaître, Awardee of the 2010 Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences, in recognition of his outstanding research on modern immunobiology...
Bruno Lemaitre’s research interest is focused on innate immunity and particularly on mechanisms of microbial infection and host defense response. By using genetic and genomic approaches of the fruit fly Drosophila model, he demonstrated that Imd and Toll pathways are involved in antimicrobial responses in insects and that they allow to discriminate the responses to infection by Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria and fungi. He identified also the bacterial determinants recognized by these pathways as well as bacteria that can infect Drosophila through the digestive tract and initiate a potent innate immune response. Currently, Bruno’s group explores the mechanisms that make the gut an efficient and interactive barrier despite its constant interactions with microbes. This fundamental knowledge generated on Drosophila immunity will have a great impact on our understanding of mammalian, in particular human immunity.
The 2010 Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences of € 250,000 is an essential part of the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation’s commitment to Biomedical
Research. It aims to support a top-level European researcher under the age of 45, along with his or her team, to pursue their work in the field of Life Science.