Thomas Michiels

Thomas Michiels obtained his PhD in Science from the University of Louvain (UCL) in 1988. He then contributed, with Guy Cornélis, to the discovery of the type III secretion system of bacteria (Michiels et al., Inf. Immun. 1990; Michiels et al., J. Bacteriol. 1991). With an EMBO long-term fellowship, he was then introduced to the field of Virology, as a post-doc at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, in the laboratory of Prof. Michel Brahic. There, he started to work on the persistent infection of the central nervous system by Theiler’s murine encephalomyelitis virus (Brahic, Bureau and Michiels, Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 2005). In 1993, as a Research Associate of the FNRS, he established his own research group at the de Duve Institute of UCL. The main discoveries made by his team at the de Duve Institute about Theiler’s virus and interferon were:

• The identification of a cis-acting RNA replication signal in the coding sequence of Cardioviruses, that turned out to be conserved in the picornavirus family (Lobert et al., PNAS, 1999)
• The observation of a type I IFN response in the mouse, including in neurons (Paul et al., PNAS 2006)
• The discovery that IFN-lambda primarily acts as an antiviral protection of epithelial tissues (Sommereyns et al. PLoS pathog. 2008)
• The elucidation of the mode of action of TMEV protein L* as an antagonist of RNase L activity (Sorgeloos et al. PLoS pathog. 2013 + Drappier et al. PLoS pathog. 2018)