Marie-Paule Lefranc, PhD

Emeritus Professor at University of Montpellier

Speaker

Marie-Paule LEFRANC (Ph.D.) is Emeritus Professor at the Montpellier University, Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France, Chair of immunogenetics and immunoinformatics, and of the Academy of Sciences and Letters of Montpellier. She is Head Emeritus of the Laboratoire d'ImmunoGénétique Moléculaire (LIGM), created with Gérard Lefranc, at Montpellier in 1982. She has authored over 300 scientific publications in international journals on the molecular immunogenetics of immunoglobulins, T cell receptors, antibody engineering, and in human genetics and immunoinformatics. She contributed to the Encyclopedia of Genetics and Encyclopedia of Systems Biology. She received the Rosen Prize of Cancerology from the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale in 1988.

She is the founder and director of IMGT®, the international ImMunoGeneTics information system®, http://www.imgt.org. By its creation in 1989 (CNRS, Montpellier University), IMGT® marked the advent of immunoinformatics, a new science, which emerged at the interface between immunogenetics and bioinformatics. IMGT® has become the global reference with databases and tools used worldwide by researchers, clinicians (leukemia and lymphoma clonality analysis) and R&D of pharmaceutical societies (therapeutic monoclonal antibody engineering and humanization). The latest development is IMGT/HighV-QUEST, the first and, so far, the only one web portal for the analysis of next generation sequencing (NGS) antigen receptor repertoires in normal (vaccinations, infections, cancers) and pathological (autoimmunity, immunodeficiencies) immune responses. Till date (November 2018), more than 18.8 billion of sequences were analysed by IMGT/HighV-QUEST, by 2685 users from 46 countries (44% users from USA, 34% from EU, 22% from other parts of the world).

In November 2018, 329 323 058 sequences were analyzed by IMGT/HighV-QUEST.