Rémi Mascarau is awarded the Dominique Dormont thesis prize 2023 from the ANRS|MIE

Although antiretroviral therapies are effective in reducing viral load in HIV-1 infected patients, one of the major challenges to complete eradication of the virus remains the elimination of viral reservoirs, including infected macrophages. In this context, the PhD work of Rémi Mascarau, in the team « Phagocyte Architecture and Dynamics » and under the direction of Drs. Christel Vérollet and Brigitte Raynaud-Messina, aimed to better understand how macrophages are infected. He described a very efficient mode of infection of macrophages by intercellular transmission of the virus from infected T lymphocytes to macrophages through a fusion mechanism between the two cell types. This mechanism could constitute the major mode of macrophage infection in vivo. These results were recently published in The Journal of Cell Biology.