Living in Montreal? A combination of circumstances. Studying HIV? A keen interest since high school. For Augustine Fert, the desire to help others is in her DNA. This quality of empathy is consistent with the research work that she’s conducting as part of the team led by Petronela Ancuta, a researcher in the Immunopathology Research Theme.
Augustine Fert has the humility of a long-distance runner. The finish line is far off, but the runner sees every kilometre as a small victory. And so it has been with Fert’s academic career—from an advanced vocational training certificate in medical biology analysis to a master’s degree in genetics and cellular biology at the University of Lyon in France and on to doctoral studies.
Now in the last year of her PhD program, the young researcher, who specializes in virology, sometimes feels she’s run a real marathon. The life of a PhD student requires a lot of endurance and resilience.
At the CRCHUM, where virology is a booming area of research, she found her place.
Th17 in the line of sight
Antiretroviral therapy has helped improve the health of HIV-positive individuals, but they are at greater risk of developing complications related to the chronicity of inflammation, such as cardiovascular diseases.
These health problems are mainly due to the viral reservoirs in which HIV persists and to the constant activation of the immune system.
“I am trying to understand why Th17 lymphocytes, pro-inflammatory cells, are more permissive to HIV than other types of lymphocytes.”
Petronela Ancuta’s team showed in previous work that, in the immune battle, these cells are among the first victims of HIV. Their loss creates a breach in the integrity of the gut mucosal barrier and leads to systemic inflammation.
“My goal is really to reduce chronic inflammation in people with HIV. To do so, I am working more specifically on the metabolic aspect of Th17, which is very sensitive, particularly to glucose metabolism.”
Fert is working with metformin, a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes (a comorbidity of HIV) that is well tolerated and already approved by the FDA. It also delays cell aging, one of the side effects of the disease.
“By using metformin, we hope to reduce HIV activity in Th17s and thus reduce their metabolism. The use of metformin could help reduce the chronic inflammation seen in people with HIV receiving combination antiretroviral therapy and improve their quality of life.”
The importance of the community
Before studying HIV at the Research Centre, Fert wasn’t aware of the difficult reality of living with the disease. For her, as for a lot of people, it was controlled by combination antiretroviral therapy.
Thanks to the involvement of Petronela Ancuta and Nicolas Chomont, a researcher at the Research Centre, through CanCURE, the Canadian HIV cure research consortium, Augustine Fert and her colleagues have the opportunity to regularly meet with people with HIV.
Talking to them makes you realize that they take a lot of drugs to control the side effects caused by the combination antiretroviral therapy, not to mention the depression that sometimes results from it.
It’s also an opportunity to talk in plain terms about our basic research projects and gauge their interest in the research work underway.
“We’re lucky in Montreal: the HIV community is very involved in research and access to human samples is fairly easy. With my project, I can see that my work could have an impact in the more or less short term on the lives of the people I’ve met.”
A future waiting to be written
“The facilities are incredible here. All the research is concentrated in the same place. For me, access to the metabolomics and cytometry core facilities, and especially the expertise of the facility managers, is a distinct advantage compared to other institutions.”
She hopes to be a research associate in a few years.
“A research associate is an important reference person in a university laboratory. I like supervising interns, transmitting my knowledge and continuing to carry out laboratory manipulations. It’s a source of tranquility for me.”
Until then, she hopes to do a postdoctoral fellowship in industry, either in Europe or North America, to be exposed to other ways of doing research.
Since writing her childhood poem about germs, Fert has managed to make her way to the world of research. Where will her next step take her?
HIV, an obvious choice