Cv

Guillaume Lacroix, 29 years old, defended his doctoral thesis in May 2022. His project, under the supervision of Jean-Luc Desseyn and Valérie Gouyer in the "mucus/mucins" group of the Unité U1286 (Univ. Lille/Inserm/CHU Lille), focused on the role of mucus and gel-forming mucins in the prevention of intrauterine infections and premature births. His work, published in the journal iScience, characterized the mouse cervical mucus plug that forms during gestation and demonstrated that mice deficient in the gel-forming mucin Muc5b produced a porous cervical mucus plug. In these mice, pathogenic E. coli O55 administered intravaginally was found in the mucus plug and the uterus. This induced a local inflammatory reaction that triggered preterm labor leading to 100% preterm births. These results demonstrate the essential barrier role of mucus and gel-forming mucins in vivo. They open perspectives for genetic studies in women to correlate a risk of preterm birth with missense or nonsense mutations in gel-forming mucin genes. Guillaume is currently working as a research engineer in a young start-up in Grenoble, EpyNext Therapeutics, to develop monoclonal antibodies to fight antibiotic-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections.