Lab members: Dr Jean-Michel Garcia, Ms Agnès Dumont, Ms Nadège Lagarde, Ms Camille Shek and Mr Jimmy Lai

HKU-Pasteur Research Centre (HKU-PRC) is developing new tools based on flow cytometry technology that will lead to enhanced identificaton of cellular factors governing virus replication as well as virus entry inhibitors and the analysis of the sero-prevalence of virus in the general population.

Flexible ...
We are using pseudotyped lentiviral vectors expressing different reporter genes. These pseudotype viruses have been generated for HIV, SARS-CoV and H5N1 avian influenza. The specificity of infection is conferred by the heterologous viral surface glycoprotein used to pseudotype the lentiviral particles. Using this flexible system, we can study viral entry at different levels: identification of viral entry inhibitor from synthetic compound- and Traditional Chinese Medicine-based libraries (Drug Discovery) (visit our partnership's page), rapid and sensitive identification of neutralizing antibodies against a given pathogen as an indication of exposure during an epidemic (sero-epidemiology) (visit our partnerships' page), or identification of cellular partner involved in the viral entry by specific gene knock-down using a siRNA library (Cellular Biology).

And yet Powerful Tool
All these applications have in common that they require the assay of large librairies of molecules. We have developed a high throughput plateform to support these applications. Since most of the time, the screened samples are in very limited amount, and we have developed an high content approach of screening to get as much information as possible per sample tested . This approach allows for instance to obtain at the same time information about cell cytotoxicity and virus entry inhibition in drug discovery or to study sero-epidemiology for different subtypes of influenza virus.