Béhazine Combadière

Behazine Combadière is a director of research (DR1) at INSERM (Institut national de Santé et de Recherche Médicale) and head laboratory “Skin, Immunity and Vaccination” at the Center for Immunology and Microbial Infections (CIMI-Paris, France). She was deputy-director of CIMI-Paris from 2014 to 2018. Béhazine Combadière obtained her PhD in Immunology in 1993 (Paris, France) on the regulation of HIV-specific CD8 responses. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda (MD, USA) from 1993 to end of 1997 where she studied the role of variability of antigen on the quality of T cell responses. Since 1998, she devoted her research to understanding of immunity to vaccines at CNRS (France) and joined Inserm (French national institute of health) at 2007 as Director of research. She has a large expertise in Vaccinology and immune memory to infectious diseases (viral diseases including smallpox, HIV, Influenza, Sars-CoV-2). She also has a large expertise in skin immunization with the development of Transcutaneous immunization (needle-free patent) using hair follicle targeting method which has been successful in several clinical studies. She coordinated the European project EU-FP7 on HIV Vaccination from 2010 to 2016. She is also workpackage leader in systems biology in vaccinology for the European project H2020 (EAVI2020 consortium) for the development of candidate HIV vaccines. She has been rewarded and supported by the following programmes young investigator in the ANR (French National Research Agency) (2005), "labelled team" by FRM (Foundation for Medical Research) in 2009, then 2013 and 2020. She is consultant for industries and biotech’s involved in vaccine development. She is currently dedicating her research work to identify predictive markers of vaccine immune efficacy in the population following vaccination (2 patents in 2020). She recently identified immunological markers of severe forms of COVID19 (patent applications in 2020). She is also co-director of International Vaccinology courses of Institute Pasteur of Paris since 2017. She has been awarded Women in Science and innovation ELLES – DE – FRANCE in 2020.