Institut Pasteur

Institut Pasteur These guiding principles make the Institut Pasteur a unique institution which values exchanges and partnerships.

A foundation for research and public health

Since its creation in 1887, the Institut Pasteur has become famous throughout the world as a symbol of science and french culture. For 120 years, our foundation has been contributing to the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases through research, teaching and public health initiatives. Across the globe, thousands of researchers who have been trained or are working at Institut Pasteur share the values which form the very core of the Pasteurian community: an original scientifi c approach, an ongoing preoccupation with applying research to public health needs, professional ethics, a desire to care for people regardless of their background or nationality, and an outward-looking attitude, sharing knowledge and expertise with the international community. The Institut Pasteur enjoys an independent status and has numerous other assets, with its research laboratories, technological platforms, teaching centre and medical centre all located on one campus in the heart of Paris. It also has an international network which currently counts 30 members spread over the five continents. With its unique setup and prestigious history, the Institut Pasteur has always stood at the forefront of innovation, adapting to the rapidly developing world of biological research and its applications, in particular in the field of biotechnology. Nowadays, the Institut Pasteur has four priorities to carry out its activities successfully :
- to target its scientific strategy towards infectious diseases, microbiology, virology and immunology;
- to adopt an outward-looking attitude, both within France, through agreements and collaborations with its partners : CNRS (French National Scientific Research Centre), Inserm (French National Institute for Health and Medical Research), universities, hospitals, industrial partners, etc., and at international level with the development of the Réseau International des Instituts Pasteur (International Network of the Institut Pasteur or RIIP), which counts 30 institutes;
- to implement transversal research programs on ambitious themes and led by young researchers;
- to preserve the foundation’s independence, in particular through increased resources from sponsorship and donations. These priorities, upholding the traditional tasks and values of the Institut Pasteur, place it at the cutting edge of the 21st century’s scientific and human challenges

04/11/2011

Adrián Peinado
.

Trabalha na empresa Hospital ClinicEstudou MASTER EN GESTION Y SALUD PUBLICA hospital clinic na instituição de ensino Universitat de Barcelona
SALUDOS DE BARCELONA!

02/11/2011

Olá Tullio,

Adolfo Martinez Rio: "Y cuando la familia es tan numerosa y presidida por un ser con tanta inteligencia ya eso es un honor, insignificante soy yo en este mundo de tanta investigacion yo me considero curioso de la vida , decir vida es decir estar abierto a corrientes nuevas e inesperadas y creo que esta corriente tiene buen caudal."

02/11/2011

Giancarlo Caverzasio:Institut Pasteur
well nice good my friend

02/11/2011

Olá Tullio,

Adolfo Martinez Rio :

Adolfo escreveu: "Me alegra saber que esta en buenas manos ela ciencia y el saber de esta gran institucion"

02/11/2011

Calmette's work in Saigon



In Saigon Albert Calmette also created the first over seas branch of the Institute where he produced an amount of smallpox and rabies vaccines sufficient to satisfy the needs of the population and started a study on venomous snakes, particularly cobras. During these studies Calmette discovered that the power of the venom as well as the tetanus’ one could be annihilated by the use of alkaline hypochlorites and was able therefore to create a serum, effective if injected right after the cobra’s bite. Back in France, he acquired enough snakes to continue his work and create serum for the local population[18].



[edit] Nicolle's work on epidemic typhus



The scientist and writer Charles Nicolle while in Tunisi studied how epidemic typhus- known for the red spots it left on sick people that disappeared before they’re death- was transmitted. He noted that now matter how many sick people were hospitalized with typhus, the disease would not to be trasmitted to people who had other disease. The brilliant intuition that enabled him to guess how the contamination happened occurred to him while he was visiting the hospital: to get in he had to climb over the cadaver of a native located not far from where the in-patients left all their clothes and this is how he suddenly understood that the vector of the disease are louse. Nevertheless it wasn’t him who discovered the bacterium responsible for the disease but other three scientists, Ricketts, Wilder and Prowazeki who called it Rickettsia prowazekii[19].

02/11/2011

The Hospital Pasteur



The Hospital Pasteur is built during the first year of the twentieth century in front of the Institute and is employed for a long time by the members as a field for clinical observation and experimentations of therapeutical processes elaborated by themselves. Since in the beginning it was provided with only 120 beds, every patient was so well isolated in his private room that each one could be almost considered a small pest house, ideal for quarantines. The construction of the Hospital was enabled by the gift of a rich benefactor, Madame Leabudy, while the money offered by another rich woman, the baroness Hirsch, was used to build a vast pavilion that accommodated the department of chemical biology of the Institute[22].



[edit] Duclaux work in the chemical biology department



The work done in the new pavilion by Duclaux clarified how the human body accomplished some of its vital functions and brought to light the role of a diastase and was finalized in resolving a controversy aroused between Pasteur and Berthelot after the publication of Claude Bernard’s posthumous essay regarding the nature of the agents implicated in some transformations that happen inside the plants like fermentation. While Pasteur believed that the only substance implied in the process of fermentation was yeast, Bernard- and Berthelot in his own way- believed that some other soluble ferment was involved: a German chemist will demonstrate the existence of this “ferment”, a intracellular diastase and will call “zymase” what we know now as enzymes. Duclaux’s study on the metabolism of nutrients will not have immediate practical applications but will reveal how extensive is the field of enzymes and open new roads that will lead biology to extend the knowledge on life’s mechanisms on a molecular level[23].



[edit] Pasteur's Museum and Tomb



The Musée Pasteur (Pasteur museum [1]) is located in the South wing of the first building occupied by the Pasteur Institute, which was inaugurated on November 14, 1888. Established in 1936, this museum houses the memory of Louis Pasteur's life and work in the vast apartment where he lived during the last seven years of his life, from 1888 to 1895. This museum also includes the collection of scientific objects illustrating the scientist's work, as well as the Byzantine funeral chapel where Pasteur is buried.

02/11/2011

Metchnikoff’s phagocytosis theory



Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov already enounced the “principle of immunization” during this voluntary exile in Italy where he went to undertake some studies, the results of which he had promptly communicated to Pasteur. The phagocytosis theory is based on the notion that phagocytes are cells that have the power to englobe foreign bodies- and above all bacteria- introduced inside an organism. German biologists opposed to his doctrine the humoral theory: they claimed to have found in Roux's serum some substances able to reveal the presence of microbes and to ensure their destruction if properly stimulated. The German scientist Eduard Buchner referred to this substances as “alexine” and two other biologists, Von Behring and Kitasato, demonstrated their lytic power towards bacteria[13]. In 1894 one of these scientist published the result of an experiment that appeared to completely refute Metchnikoff’s ideas: using the cholera vibrio, discovered ten years before by Robert Koch, as an antigen, Richard F. J. Pfeiffer introduced it in the abdomen of a guinea pig already vaccinated against this disease and was able to observe the destruction of the vibrio in the local blood plasma, without the participation of the phagocytes. Not even this study is able to shake Metchnikoff’s belief and faith in his theory and his ideas, as well as Pfeiffer’s and Buchner’s will all contribute to the elaboration of the current theory of the immune system.



[edit] Yersin's studies on the plague



Yersin, after his research with Roux, leaves abruptly the Institute for personal reasons, without losing Pasteur’s benevolence, who never doubts that the young man is destined to great things in the scientific area and will contribute in spreading the pastorian spirit around the world. The news of a violent plague outburst in Yunman enables Yersin to truly show and reach his potential as he is called, as Pasteur’s scholar, to conduct a microbiological research of the disease. The plague he has to deal with is the “bubonic plague” which is recognizable most of the time through the abscesses, “buboes”, it provokes in its victims. Yersin looks for the germ responsible for the infection specifically in this plague-spots, tumors caused by the inflammation of the lymphatic glands which become black because of the necrosis of the tissue[14]. After many microscopic exams he is able to state that in most of the cases the bubonic plague bacterium is located in these buboes; but in the meanwhile the Japanese scientist Kitasato also declares that he has isolated the bacterium, even though the description he provides is dissimilar to the one given by Yersin. Therefore, although at first named “Kitasato-Yersin bacillus” by the scientific community, the microbe will later assume only the latter’s name because the one identified by Kitasato, a type of streptococcus, cannot be found in the lymphatic glands. However it is Paul-Louis Simond the first to understand and describe the etiology of the plague and its modality of contamination: he observes all over the bodies of the people affected by it small flea bites, which he also found on the bodies of the dead rats that were always linked to the plague and then deduced that the fleas, which carried the bacteria, were its true cause and that they transmitted the illness by jumping from the dead rat's body to the human one and biting it[15].



Paul-Louis Simond injecting a plague vaccine on the 4th of June 1898 in the Vishandas Hospital, Karachi

[edit] Calmette's and Guerin's antituberculosis vaccine



In the beginning of the twentieth century the improvement of the general life conditions and the development of a more extensive conception of hygiene determines in France a slight regression in consumption cases: nonetheless the Institute’s labs, like many other ones, keeps trying to find among Koch’s bacillus many singularities the one that will allow them to find an antidote to its terrible consequences. Right after he had discovered the bacillus, Koch had tried in vain to create a vaccine against it, however the injection of the filtrate he had prepared, later called old tubercolin had the effect of revealing who was phthisic from who wasn’t by causing in the latter-and not in the former-fever and light trembing.

02/11/2011

The accomplishments of the Institute's members



[edit] Roux's cure against diphtheria and studies on syphilis



Production of antiserum at the Pasteur Institute in Paris

Not long after the Institute’s inauguration, Roux, now less occupied in the fight against rabies, resumes in a new lab and with the help of a new addition, Yersin, his experiments on diphtheria. This disease used to kill every year thousands of children: commonly called “croup” because it creates fake membranes in the small patient’s throat, therefore killing him by suffocation, deserves to be called “Horrible monster, sparrow hawk of the shadows” by Victor Hugo in his “Art of being a grandfather”. The painter Albert Gustaf Aristides Edelfelt has drawn a famous painting portraying Pasteur in his laboratory while he is trying to cure this illness that was handled at the times through procedures that were just as cruel as the illness itself.



Roux and Yersin grow the bacillus that causes it and study, thanks to various experiments they do on rabbits, its pathogenic power and symptoms, like the paralysis of the respiratory muscles[8]. It is this last consequence of the diphtheria that provides the two researchers with a valuable clue of the nature of the disease since it is caused by an intoxication due to a toxin introduced into the organism by the bacillus, that while secreting this particular venom is able to multiply itself: they are therefore inclined to think that the bacillus owes its virulence to the toxin. After filtrating the microbial culture of the Corynebacterium diphtheriae and injecting it into the lab animals, they are able to observe all the typical signs of the sickness. Roux and Yersin establish that they are dealing with a new type of bacillus, not only able to proliferate and abundantly reproduce itself, but also capable of spreading at the same time a powerful venom and they deduce that it can play the role of antigen, that is if they can overcome the delicate moment of its injection, made especially dangerous by the toxin[9]. Some German researchers have also discovered the diphtheria toxin and are trying to immunize some guinea pigs through the use of a vaccine: one of them, Von Behring, Robert Koch's student states that he was able to weaken small doses of the toxin. Nonetheless Roux is not convinced by this result since no one knows the collateral effects of the procedure and prefers to use serotherapy since more than one lab research- like the one accomplished by Charles Richet- demonstrated that the serum of an animal vaccinated against the disease includes the antibodies needed to defeat it. The antidiphtheria serum which is able to agglutinate the bacteria and neutralize the toxin is supplied by a horse inoculated with the viral germs and it is separated from the blood drawn from the horses’ jugular vein. Like it happened for his teacher with the antirabies vaccine, Roux will need to test the effectiveness of the product he elaborated and endure all the stress and ethical dilemmas that the first use of such a risky but also groundbreaking procedure implies. To test the serum two groups of children are chosen from two different hospitals: in the first one, which receives the serum, 338 out of 449 children survive, in the latter one, treated with the custom therapies, only 204 out of 520 do. Once the results are made public by “Figaro`” newspaper a subscription is opened to raise the money needed to provide the Institute the amount of horses necessary to produce enough serum to satisfy the national demand[10].



After Duclaux’s death, Roux takes his place as head of the Institute and the last research he carries out is the one on syphilis, a dangerous disease because of its immediate effects and the hereditary ripercussions that result from it. Despite Fournier’s considerable work Van Swieten’s liquid mercury is still the only known cure, although its results are doubtful and uncertain. The search for a stronger remedy against this disease is made more difficult because most animals are immune to it: it is thus not possible to experiment possible cures and study their likely side effects[11]. The sexually transmittable Treponema pallidum ( the syphlis germ), detected by two german biologists, Schaudinne and Hoffmann, affects only the human race – where it resides in s***m, ulceration and cancers that it is able to cause- and, as it will be later discovered, some anthropoid apes, especially chimpanzees. Both Roux and Metchnikoff, consequently to the discovery that this type of ape can be contaminated with the illness, contributed with their research in creating a vaccine ( while Bordet and Wasserman elaborate a solution that is able to expose the germ’s presence in human blood): even though it is not yet a completely reliable solution it represents a noteworthy evolution compared to the previous medicines used against syphilis[12].

02/11/2011

The Institute's economical difficulties during the Seventies



At the end of 1973 the Institute’s economic status is so worrisome that its troubles arouse the public’s interest: no one can believe that an institution which has to provide vaccines and serums for more that fifty million people can be undergoing such big economic problems, an institution that furthermore is believed to be under the government protection –like the Bank of France- and therefore shielded from bankruptcy. The causes of the decadence that is bringing the Institute to ruins are multiple, but most of them can be identified with its commercial and industrial activities and its management. Both the research and production branch have to endure the recoil caused by financial issues: the research doesn’t receive enough funds and the production, which keeps losing market ground to the new private labs, is immobilized by the antiquated mechanical supplies.



When in 1968, after disappearing for a long period, rabies comes back to France, the Institute, who owes its original celebrity to this disease’s vaccine, is replaced by other pharmaceutical industries in the production of the vaccines; yet, despite the deficiencies in the production’s organization, its members are able to produce, in 1968, over 400000 doses of vaccine against the Hong Kong influenza.



In 1971 Jacques Monod announces a new era of modernization and development: this new awakening is symbolized by the construction of a new factory where all the production’s departments are going to be reunited. Its construction will cost forty five millions and the Government, positively impressed by the Institute’s will to change, will grant it a sum of twenty million francs to bridge the deficit, followed by the people’s initiative to also accept a role in the division of the financial responsibilities [7].

02/11/2011

The Institute during World War I and World War II



During the first World War the Institute is not only involved in the prevention of sanitary risks but also has to deal with the demands of the moment. The most urgent matter is to vaccinate the troops against the thyphoid fever, easily contracted by the soldiers who often have no choice but to drink from small streams or puddles of water from the last rain. After a month from the beginning of the war the Institute is able to provide 670000 doses of the needed vaccine and continues to produce it throughout the conflict. It is important to underline that war brings to the light germs that during times of peace are concealed deep within the soil or secret zones of putrefaction and therefore it reveals the true nature and amplitude of some types of pathologies that would otherwise remain unknown. That's how Weinberg, Metchnikoff’s scholar, discloses the complex etiology of the gas gangrene and creates a vaccine for each one of the anaerobes associated to it[3]. The first world war causes the involvement of science in the warfare business: a movement of active participation rises between the researchers who feel the need to help France win the war and find support to their actions in patriotic argumentations. This is why Gabriel Bertrand, with Roux’s authorization, crafts a gr***de based on chloropicrin and Fourneau discovers the chemical reaction that leads to the formation of methylarsine's chloride whose effects are even worse of the ones of other venomous gases used during the war.



In 1938 the Institute, despite its relative poverty, builds and edifice that hosts a biochemical division and another one dedicated to cellular pathology, whose direction is entrusted to the hands of Boivin (who will discover the endotoxines -more appropriately called glucid- lipo- polipeptidic toxines- that are contained in the germ’s body and are freed after its death) and during the same period Andre Lwoff assumes the direction of a new microbial physiology branch built on rue Dutot[4]. The general mobilitation determined by France’s war declaration against Germany , in September of 1939, empties the Istitute, also significantly reducing its activities, of the members in the age or condition appropriate for being recruited in the army but the almost total absence of battles during the first months of the conflict keeps the sanitary situation on the front in the norm. The Germans never tried to gather information on the Institute’s research: their confidence in Germany’s advantage in this field decreased their curiosity and their only interest was in the serums and vaccines that it could provide to their troops or the European auxiliaries they recluted. This – in the lack of a better term- freedom allowes the Institute to become, during the two years after the occupation, the greatest pharmacy for the Resistance thanks to the initiative of Vallery-Radot, Pasteur’s nephew. The Germans become suspicious of the Institute’s staff only after the outbreak of a typhoid epidemic in a division of the Wehrmacht that was stationed in the parisian region before being sent to the Russian front[5]. The cause of the epidemy will be exposed later by some French men: a member of the Institute had stolen a culture of the germ responsible for the disease and, with the collaboration of an accomplice situated near the German troops, infected a large quantity of butter with it. The fact that, after the Germans sold some of the butter to the enemy, the epidemy spread to the civil population is proof that the illness’s breakout was not caused by the local waters. Afterwards the German authorities ordered that the Institute’s stoves containing microbial cultures could be opened only by authorized members of the personnel; a similar security problem also induces them to demand complete lists of the staff’s names and functions: the reason behind some absences is well known to the German’s who sent two very valuable biologists, Doctor Wolmann and his wife, as well as other three lab assistants to a concentration camp. The Institute won’t constitute a location for entrenchment even after the burst of the battles for Paris’s liberation because its inviolability and sacredness as well as the fear that involving it in any type of conflict might “free the ghosts of long defeated diseases”[6].

02/11/2011

The biggest mistake by the Institute was ignoring a dissertation by Ernest Duchesne on the use of Penicillium glaucum to cure infections in 1897. The early exploitation of his discovery might have saved millions of lives, especially in World War I.



A new age of preventive medicine in France was made possible by such developments from the Pasteur Institute as vaccines for tuberculosis, diphtheria, tetanus, yellow fever, poliomyelitis, and hepatitis B. The discovery and use of sulfonamides in treating infections was another breakthrough. Some researchers won fame by discovering antitoxins and Daniel Bovet received the 1957 Nobel Prize for his discoveries on synthetic anti-histamines and curarizing compounds.



Since World War II, Pasteur researchers have sharply focused on molecular biology. Their achievements were recognized in 1965, when the Nobel Prize was shared by François Jacob, Jacques Monod and André Lwoff for their work on the regulation of viruses. In 1985, the first human vaccine obtained by genetic engineering from animal cells, the vaccine against hepatitis B, was developed by Pierre Tiollais and collaborators.



The building hosting the Museum and the funeral chapel of Pasteur

[edit] The Institute's opening



Although the center against rabies, directed by Jacques-Joseph Grancher and Émile Roux is more than functional, it is also so overcrowded that it becomes necessary to build a structure that Pasteur has been calling with the name “Institute Pasteur” long before it was even built. Since Pasteur can’t, for health reasons, do it himself, he delegates the task of projecting and creating the new building, situated on rue Dutot, to two of his most trusted colleagues, Grancher and Emile Duclaux[1].



From the beginning the Institute experiences some economical difficulties that it is able to overcome thanks to the help of the government, some foreign rulers and Madame Boucicaut but this aid won’t in any way restrain its independence, therefore respecting Pasteur’s most important prerogative. The million francs left unused won’t be sufficient to provide for the Institute’s needs for long, but the prestigiousness and the social benefits it will bring to France justify and motivate the subsidy it will receive; also the money brought in from selling the vaccines in France and in the rest of the world will help in supporting it. In 1888 this foundation, which has obtained the full approval from the government, begins to function and from the beginning it is involved in the development and changes that France undergoes during the last decades of the XIX century[2].



The statutes drawn by Pasteur and later approved by Duclaux and Grancher define, besides its absolute freedom and independence, the Institutes internal repartition: a rabies division controlled by Grancher, an anthrax one in Chamberland’s hands, who will also supervise the department of microbiology while Emile Roux will deal with microbial methods applied to medicine.

02/11/2011

L'INSTITUT LOUIS PASTEUR( POUR TULLIO SOUZA LIMA ).

por Tullio Souza Lima, quarta, 2 de Novembro de 2011 às 02:54

History



The Institut Pasteur was founded in 1887 by Louis Pasteur, the French scientist whose early experiments with fermentation led to pioneering research in bacteriology. A giant in science, Pasteur discovered the principle of sterilization which came to be known as "pasteurization." His discoveries led to the universal practice of surgical antisepsis. He also developed techniques of vaccination to control bacterial infection, as well as a successful vaccine to treat rabies.



Louis Pasteur was committed both to basic research and its practical applications. As soon as his institute was created, Pasteur brought together scientists with various specialties. The first five departments were directed by two normaliens (graduates of the Ecole Normale Supérieure): Emile Duclaux (general microbiology research) and Charles Chamberland (microbe research applied to hygiene), as well as a biologist, Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (morphological microbe research) and two physicians, Jacques-Joseph Grancher (rabies) and Emile Roux (technical microbe research). One year after the inauguration of the Institut Pasteur, Roux set up the first course of microbiology ever taught in the world, then entitled Cours de Microbie Technique (Course of microbe research techniques).



Pasteur's successors have sustained this tradition, and it is reflected in the Institut Pasteur's unique history of accomplishment:

Emile Roux and Alexandre Yersin discovered the mechanism of action of Corynebacterium diphtheriae and how to treat diphtheria with antitoxins;

Alexandre Yersin discovered in 1894 the pathogen of bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis;

Paul-Louis Simond discovered in 1898 the role of the flea in the transmission of plague;

Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin discovered how to culture the tuberculosis bacillus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (so called BCG or Bacillus Calmette-Guérin) at Institut Pasteur de Lille and developed in 1921 the first effective antituberculosis vaccine;

Alphonse Laveran got the 1907 Nobel Prize for his research on the role of protozoans as disease agents (notably, his discovery of the malaria hematozoon)

Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov received the Nobel Prize in 1908 for contributions to scientific understanding of the immune system

Constantin Levaditi and Karl Landsteiner demonstrated in 1910 that poliomyelitis is due to a filterable virus;

Félix d'Herelle discovered in 1917 the bacteriophage, a virus that spread only inside bacteria;

Jules Bordet received the Nobel prize in 1919 for his discoveries on immunity, especially the implication of antibodies and the mechanisms of action of the complement;

Charles Nicolle received the Nobel prize in 1928 for unraveling the mystery of how typhus is transmitted, especially the role of the louse;

Jean Laigret developed in 1932 the first vaccine for yellow fever;

André Lwoff established in 1951 the existence of proviruses

Pierre Lépine developed in 1954 one of the first antipolio vaccines

Jean-Pierre Changeux isolated in 1970 the first receptor to a neurotransmitter, the acetylcholine receptor.

Luc Montagnier, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and colleagues discovered the two HIV viruses that cause AIDS, in 1983 and 1985, was honored by the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

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