Lisa Chakrabarti is Director of Research (Associate Professor) at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. She leads the group "Control of Chronic Viral Infections" (CIVIC), in the Virus and Immunity Unit: https://research.pasteur.fr/en/team/group-lisa-chakrabarti/
After agronomical engineer studies, she joined the Pasteur Institute to research how HIV and SIV disseminate in the body and perturb their target cells, the CD4 T lymphocytes. This topic was pursued during a 4-year stay at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center of New York, in the laboratories of Cecilia Cheng-Mayer and Preston Marx. Upon her return to the Pasteur in 2001, she started a group studying viral pathogenesis, with a focus on HIV controllers, i.e. patients who naturally control HIV replication in the absence of therapy. The team could show that these rare patients develop particularly efficient antiviral CD4+ T cells, due to the expression of high-affinity T cell receptors (Benati, J Clin Invest 2016; Galperin, Sci Immunol 2018; Claireaux, Nat Commun 2022). More recently, the group started to develop 3D culture models of primary human cells to understand how SARS-CoV-2 spreads in the airways (Robinot, Nat Commun 2021) and how it may cause long-term dysfunction, as observed in Long COVID.
