At the 27th Annual Congress of the French Cytometry Association (AFC) in December 2024 and the 8th German Mass Cytometry User Forum in February 2025, Julie Bigay and Mathieu Van Tilbeurgh of IDMIT Department—PhD student in the Immunity and Transmission laboratory and engineer in the FlowCyTech laboratory, respectively—each received a Young Researcher First Prize for oral presentation.

Their work, carried out as part of the “Yellow Fever Memory” project in collaboration with Sanofi Pasteur, focuses on the mechanisms involved in the induction and persistence of the immune response to the yellow fever vaccine, considered as the benchmark for long-term immunity. They are characterizing systemic immune responses to the vaccine with the aim of identifying predictive markers for the long-term persistence of neutralizing antibodies. Their research also explores the persistence of the viral antigen in tissues and its role in modulating immune responses.

To establish a link between systemic and tissue immunity, they have developed, in collaboration with a team at the Montpellier Cancer Research Institute (IRCM), an Imaging Mass Cytometry (IMC) technology panel enabling in situ analysis of immune responses and antigen persistence.​

©Jacqueline Hircher, 8th German Mass Cytometry users form