Professor Lluis Quintana-Murci, Chair of Human Genomics and Evolution at the Collège de France, and his Human Evolutionary Genetics Unit at the Institut Pasteur, join the COVID Human Genetic Effort. This international consortium, led by Rockefeller University (New York, USA) and the National Institutes of Health, aims to discover the rare or common single-gene errors in immunity that cause severe forms of Covid-19 in previously healthy individuals. Similarly, it aims to discover the rare or common monogenic variations that make certain individuals resistant to infection by SARS-CoV-2 itself, despite repeated exposure.
With these two lines of research, the COVID Human Genetic Effort aims to discover the rare or common monogenic variations involved in disease development or resistance, and to decipher in depth the molecular, cellular and immunological mechanisms by which they actually cause resistance to viral infection or predisposition to severe disease.
Professor Lluis Quintana-Murci and his laboratory will contribute their expertise in the fields of population genetics and the functional genomics of infection.
