Tineke Cantaert

I am  currently head of the Immunology Unit at Institut Pasteur du Cambodge and HHMI/Wellcome International Research Scholar. I am interested to unravel host immune responses to infectious diseases of high prevalence in South-East Asia. Our mission is to understand the immunopathology of emerging infectious diseases. Our main fields of research are  1/ to provide insight into the mechanisms of  a protective adaptive immune response  to flavivirus infection for novel vaccine design 2/ to improve vaccination strategies for vaccine-preventable diseases such as rabies 3/ to identify novel biomarkers of severity after dengue virus infection or treatment response in TB/HIV co-infection 4/ to study skin immunity to mosquito saliva and 5/ to understand adaptive immune responses to SARS-CoV-2. Our laboratory is equipped with state of the art equipment providing platforms for single cell analysis and monoclonal antibody production.

After obtaining my Master Degree in Biochemistry from the University of Ghent (2003), I moved to Amsterdam where I performed my PhD studies in Clinical Immunology (2008). I was granted a postdoctoral fellowship from the Dutch Research Organization for a postdoctoral Fellow position at Yale University, CT, USA, at the Immunology Department (2011-2013). I returned to Belgium as Assistant Professor at the University of Leuven (2014). After obtaining a 4-year-group grant from the Institut Pasteur International Network, I setup my own research group dedicated to flavivirus Immunology at Institut Pasteur du Cambodge (2015). Currently, I am a HHMI-Wellcome International Research Scholar (2017) and I obtained the research Prize in Vaccinology R&D from the IUIS (2017). In 2018, I became the Head of the newly created Immunology Unit at Institut Pasteur du Cambodge and became a permanent staff scientist at Institut Pasteur.