Professor, head of the “HIV, Inflammation and Viral Persistence” Unit
Institut Pasteur
France
Michaela Müller-Trutwin is a Professor at Institut Pasteur, France, where she heads the HIV, Inflammation and Viral Persistence Unit. She studied biology at the University of Bonn and obtained her PhD from the University of Paris in the Barré-Sinoussi lab. She is a co-founder of the Center for Innovative Therapies for Infectious Diseases and the HIV cure task force, RHIVIERA, at the French agency for HIV and emerging diseases (ANRS-MIE). For 10 years, Michaela has chaired the nonhuman primate working group for HIV and AIDS and, since 2018, has chaired HIV basic and translational research coordination at the ANRS-MIE with a focus on HIV cure research. She has served as Dean of the Pasteur-Paris University PhD programme and Vice-President of the Scientific Council at Institut Pasteur.
Through collaborations with institutes in western and central Africa and Southeast Asia, she contributed to understanding the extreme worldwide diversity of HIV and related simian immunodeficiency viruses. These studies contributed to a better understanding of the origin of HIV and the design of viral load assays.
Subsequently, she became interested in deciphering the mechanism underlying AIDS and pioneered the study of innate immune responses and genome-wide analyses in African Old-World monkeys. Her studies were among those that provided strong evidence that inflammation is the driving force of AIDS. She then aimed to understand mechanisms of viral persistence and discovered functions of NK cells in controlling SIV reservoirs in tissues. She expanded her work to SARS-CoV-2 and demonstrated the role of adaptive NK cells in viral long-term persistence in alveolar macrophages. She aims to study fundamental mechanisms that translate into clinics and foster a new generation of scientists. Her work has been honoured by several awards, such as from the French Medical Research Foundation.