Marc PouliotPh.D.

Dr. Marc Pouliot is a Full Professor in the Department of Microbiology-Infectious Diseases and Immunology, of the Laval University School of Medicine, leading a knowledge development program on the implication of neutrophils in inflammatory responses. After completing his Ph.D in 1994 in molecular biology at Laval University, under the supervision of Dr. Pierre-Borgeat, Dr. Pouliot specialized in immunology during two postdoctoral fellowships, at the Royal Adelaide Hospital (South Australia), and then at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA), he joined in 2000 (Full professor since 2009). He was awarded competitive scholarships, continuously from Master’s degree to Senior Investigator level, from: Fonds canadien pour l’avancement de la recherche (Masters); Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec (Ph.D.); Medical Research Council (Post-doc, and Centennial Distinguished Post-doc awards); Canadian Pain Society, Banting Research Foundation, CAN, TAS and CIHR (New Investigator & Investigator); and from FRSQ (Junior & Senior Investigator). As PI, he has been funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for the last 17 years, and by The Arthritis Society (TAS), the Canadian Arthritis Network (CAN; a National Center of Excellence), the National Institutes of Health (US), and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI). Some career numbers: Peer-reviewed publications: 53, Book chapters: 5, h index: 25 (2394 citations, 882 since 2012), i10 index: 33 (Google Scholar), Funding (as PI): >2M$. He has supervised 4 post-docs, 30 graduate students and trainees, and has reviewed more than 45 Ph.D. theses and Master’s memoirs.

Adenosine & neutrophils

Dr. Pouliot’s research program focusses on extricating the full worth of neutrophils in innate immunity. He and his team have contributed to show that neutrophils can produce a tightly regulated array of mediators, including eicosanoids, cytokines, and chemokines, that can influence each of the phases of an inflammatory response. His team showed that engagement of the adenosine A2A receptor represents a master key in re-programming neutrophils, on one hand by shifting their leukotriene B4-generating capacity toward prostaglandin E2 instead, and on the other hand, by preventing the generation of inflammatory cytokines, including TNF. How A2A receptor engagement can favour the resolution phase of inflammation through its actions on neutrophils has raised considerable interest, exemplified by invited oral presentations during: the 6th World Congress on Inflammation (WCI, Vancouver), at the 8th WCI (Copenhagen), the Purines Congress (Copenhagen), the opening session of the Banff Inflammation Workshop, the 9th WCI (Tokyo), the joint SLB and Neutrophil 2016 in Verona (Italy) and, most recently, the 13th WCI (July 2017, London, UK).

Transcriptome profiling

Twice funded by the CFI (Leaders Fund) with which state-of-the-art, medium throughput, quantitative real-time PCR systems were acquire for the research program. The team can now exploit sections of neutrophils’ transcriptomes and of other tissues to characterize their activation profile (Boudreau et al., 2014; Duchez et al., 2015; Laflamme et al., 2014) and use distinctive alterations therein for diagnostic purposes. Dr. Pouliot was invited present this emerging piece of work at « The Society for Leukocyte Biology’s 49th Annual Meeting, in Verona (Italy) in September of 2016.