Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale

Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM) operates under the joint authority of the French Ministry of Health and French Ministry of Research. INSERM’s mission is to facilitate the exchange between basic, clinical, therapeutic and public health research leveraging on its scientific expertise in several fields and covering a very large spectrum of human diseases.

Since 2004, INSERM holds the Jean Mérieux BSL-4 Laboratory, which meets the most drastic international biological safety standards enabling to play a key role in the early warning and surveillance of epidemics. Organized as a big infrastructure open to the whole national and international scientific community that needs to handle risk group 4 (RG4) infectious pathogens, the laboratory is the only one in France empowered to receive and study samples infected by RG4 pathogens. This infrastructure provides cutting edge facilities and proposes the largest Animal Biosafety Level 4 facility in Europe, allowing performing experimentations with animal models ranking from small rodents to Non-Human Primates. Concerning the diagnosis, the laboratory is one of the 2 pillars of the National reference center for risk group 4 pathogens. Contribution to the development of diagnostic tools is a high commitment of the Jean Mérieux BSL4 laboratory. The laboratory is also strongly involved bring assistance in the fields, it is one of the partners of the European Mobile Lab project funded by EC and deployed till March 2014 in Guinea, as well as the coordinator of the EUWAMLab project, a new project funded by DG DEVCO, complementary to EMLab that aims at deploying a more ergonomic mobile lab in the field.

With the EVIDENT project, the INSERM team will bring its high level expertise and experience in the tasks dedicated to the fieldwork for follow up of survivors as well as to the characterisation and kinetics of neutralisating antibody response in these survivors. It will be also involved in the identification of biomarkers of the disease and in the determination of infectivity in body fluid at various stage of the disease.