Rodrigue-gervais Ian Gaël

Biography

Dr. Rodrigue-Gervais obtained his B.Sc. in Biology from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2000), and subsequently completed his M.Sc. (2005) and Ph.D. in Immunovirology (2008 ) at the Université de Montréal, under the direction of Prof. Rafick-Pierre Sékaly and Daniel Lamarre. He completed his postdoctoral internship in biochemistry and genetics of necrotic cell death with Professor Maya Saleh at McGill University (2010-2016). He then joined the faculty of the INRS-Institut Armand-Frappier in the summer of 2016.

Research Interest

The suicide of an infected cell is the most effective defense against viruses, these being obligatory intracellular parasites. Rodrigue-Gervais's laboratory studies the regulation of necrotic death triggered by inflammasoma in the context of viral and neurodegenerative pathogenesis. Surprising phenomenon, extracellular inflammasomes continue to activate the death by an autonomous process when it is ingested by the neighboring cells. For this reason, being killed by a friendly shot often becomes an inevitable risk of this defense process. We focus our research on: (1) how inflammasomes come to know when to trigger the signal to a cell that it is time to die, (2) the physiological importance of this cell death in the antiviral defense of the antiviral, host and health, and (3) its regulation by inter-organelle communication between the mitochondria and the autophagic-lysosomal degradation system. In the latter case, we want to understand how mitoproteases cause changes in the function of lysosomes in order to block the induction of cell death by inflammatory caspases.