Health

Research on pandemics

Intensify research on pandemics

Aids, malaria, hepatitides... pandemics affect almost all the countries in the world. To save lives, research on these diseases must be intensified. Mindful of helping this cause, the Total Foundation has renewed its commitment to the Institute Pasteur. To this effect it is helping create the Françoise Barré-Sinoussi endowed chair and is providing funding for research programs.

A new impetus for the partnership

In 2010, the Total Foundation reaffirmed its support of the Institute Pasteur, a major player in biomedical research worldwide. According to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, researcher and winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2008, this type of contribution is “determinant for the future of research and its application in the field, as well as for international collaboration”. The new patronage agreement provides for funding in the amount of 10 million euros through 2015.

TESTIMONY

“A new infectious pathology emerges every eight months.”

Professor Patrice Debré, of the French Ministry of Foreign and European affairs, is the French ambassador responsible for combating HIV/Aids and communicable diseases.
Read the testimony

Creation of the Françoise Barré-Sinoussi Endowed Chair

The funding program includes for creating the Françoise Barré-Sinoussi Endowed Chair, dedicated to research on mechanisms protecting against the Aids virus. The Chair will be set up as of 2012 in the future biology center being built on the Institute Pasteur campus in Paris, which is to include an emerging diseases department. Total Foundation's contribution to this project is 800 000 euros per year.

Supporting research programs

The sponsorship agreement signed with the Institute Pasteur also concerns funding for research programs in the field of infectious diseases. Included among these investigations is research on mechanisms protecting against the Aids virus, on infantile diarrheas and on meningitis.

Via commitments made by its subsidiaries, Total helped fund, between 2005 and 2009, four major research programs undertaken by the Institute Pasteur:

  • the combat against Hepatitis C ,
  • the emergency diagnosis of infantile diarrheas, [links to the Madagascar and Central African Republic data sheets],
  • the development of a vaccine to protect against the dengue virus,
  • the study of cell death induced in response to infections.

To carry out these cross-entity projects effectively, the Institute Pasteur teams work closely with young researchers and local scientists. ”The ongoing collaboration with the International Medical Research Center of Franceville (CIRMF) in Gabon is a good example,”  explains Professor Patrice Debré, the French ambassador of the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs responsible for the fight against HIV/Aids and communicable diseases. “The goal is to define the conditions for the emergence of new infectious diseases, taking as the model the Ebola and Chikungunya viruses.”