Andrés PIZZORNO

Biography

Andrés Pizzorno graduated with a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from Universidad de la República (Uruguay) in 2008 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Microbiology-Immunology (2011 and 2015) from Laval University (Canada). Former fellow of the Knowledge Translation and Pandemic Preparedness Program of the PHAC-CIHR Influenza Research Network (Canada) during the 2009-11 influenza pandemic, his doctoral work at Dr. Guy Boivin’s research team focused on the mechanisms of antiviral resistance in influenza viruses and the evaluation of new combined therapies. In 2015 he moved to Lyon (France) to start his postdoctoral training at the VirPath Team of the Centre International de Recherche en Infectiologie (CIRI), where he became Permanent Investigator in 2020.

Research Focus

Building on +12 years of research experience in the field of respiratory viruses, antiviral resistance and therapeutics, his research focuses on the study of fundamental virus-host interactions at the transcriptomic, molecular, and cellular level, with particular attention to the interplay between the virus and the early innate immune responses in the respiratory mucosa. The scientific expertise of Dr. Pizzorno is mainly centered on the fields of virology, immunology, respiratory physiology, transcriptomics, innovative pre-clinical models, and virus/host-directed antiviral approaches. He is author of more than 40 scientific publications (including Nature, Cell, J Exp Med, Cell Rep Med, etc) and co-inventor of several patents. The VirPath Team being part of the French REACTing network for the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Pizzorno has been in the frontline of research activities on SARS-CoV-2 from the early days of 2020, with important contributions to the field, including: i) being one of the very first teams worldwide to isolate the novel virus from clinical samples, ii) the characterization of the virus biology and its interactions with the host response, iii) the exploitation of the IFN response as a potential prognosis biomarker and the demonstration of functional role of anti-IFN autoantibodies, iv) the analysis of the effect of different spatial conformations of the Spike protein on its capacity to form syncytia in the respiratory tissue and, v) the pre-clinical and clinical evaluation of therapeutic candidates. 

Dr. Pizzorno leads and participates in different collaborative research projects at the national and international level and has recently been appointed Scientific Director of the International Associated Lab (LIA-RespiVir) between Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and Université Laval. Dr. Pizzorno is also co-chair of the Executive Committee of the Antiviral Group of the International Society for Influenza and Other Respiratory Virus Diseases (isirv-AVG, https://isirv.org) and co-founder of Signia Therapeutics SAS, a French-based biotech developing a breakthrough proprietary drug-discovery strategy to accelerate the identification, validation and low-cost development of drugs for new antimicrobial indications against respiratory human pathogens.

Twitter: @PizzornoAndres

Publications

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=andres+pizzorno&sort=date
• https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-KzZH9sAAAAJ&hl=en