Catherine Grillot-Courvalin

Associate Professor at the Pasteur Institute, Unit of Antibacterial Agents, Paris, France. Dr. Grillot-Courvalin trained as a pediatrician with a specialty in immunology and was appointed Assistant Professor at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in 1980. She has pioneered the field of bacterial delivery and her group was the first to describe efficient delivery of plasmid DNA with engineered /E.coli/ into a variety of mammalian cells in a landmark article in Nature Biotechnology in 1998.

Numerous laboratories worldwide are using her technology to engineer E.coli as carriers for both DNA or protein therapeutics, and she is one of the most widely published and cited scientists in the area of bacteriofection. She is an editor of BioBugs, a publication focusing on the use of genetically modified bacteria for therapeutic purposes. Dr. Grillot-Courvalin’s laboratory is currently focusing on the improvement of bacterial delivery vectors for their use in gene therapy and vaccine development.