Biosketch

Maria LEITE DE MORAES is a Senior Research Director (DR1) at CNRS. 

She made seminal discoveries on the ontogeny and function of invariant Natural Killer T (iNKT) and on their role in experimental and clinical allergic asthma. She described iNKT17 cells as a distinct lineage. Her goal is to answer fundamental questions about T cell activation in a way that is translatable to allergic and inflammatory disorders, in particular asthma and dermatosis. For this, she stablished a successful collaboration with the clinicians of the Necker Hospital. While contributing to several fundamental discoveries of the biology of iNKT and MAIT (mucosal-associated invariant T) cells, her team demonstrated that these lymphocytes are present in the lung of severe asthmatic children and associated with the exacerbation of this pathology. Her group is accumulating important data from patient samples in order to identify the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in the dysregulation of allergic and inflammatory diseases.