INRAE ENVT UMR 1225 IHAP, host pathogen interactions unit, Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse

Key facts

• The unit describes itself as a joint research unit founded in 2003 that studies interactions between pathogenic microorganisms and their hosts at several biological scales, with about one hundred scientists and technicians, on the ENVT campus at 23 chemin des Capelles in Toulouse, and lists seven teams including PRIONS.
• The PRIONS team is led by Olivier Andreoletti as team leader with Tomas Barrio as co-leader, lists nine members, and sets out three themes: prion strain plasticity, transmission within and between species, and the pathogenesis of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, plus a second strand applying prion mechanisms to prion-like diseases.
• The 2014 PLoS Pathogens blood study (e-pub 12 June 2014) was first authored by Caroline Lacroux and last authored by Andreoletti, both at UMR INRA ENVT 1225 in Toulouse, with CEA iMETI SEPIA, INRA Jouy-en-Josas, Hospices Civils de Lyon, an EFS laboratory in Lille, INRA Nouzilly, VLA Weybridge and the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut as coauthor institutions.
• In that study ovine Q171 PrP substrates amplified variant CJD and BSE agents best whatever species the prion came from; in BSE challenged sheep white blood cells were positive from 12 months after inoculation against clinical signs at 20 months, and in macaques infected with variant CJD buffy coat was positive at 10 to 14 months, which the authors put at more than 32 months before clinical onset.
• In the blinded human panels of the same study the assay identified three of four variant CJD patients and gave no false positive among 141 healthy controls, with one case missed even after six rounds; the authors read that as possible low or absent prionemia, or inhibition by buffy coat components.
• The 2021 Acta Neuropathologica Communications study of growth hormone iatrogenic CJD (e-pub 28 August 2021) was first authored by Jean-Yves Douet and last authored by Andreoletti, with nine of the twenty-three authors in Toulouse; it compared eleven UK and eleven French cases in mice expressing human PrP and found the strains matched the two commonest sporadic CJD strains, M1 and V2, mostly V2 or mixtures, and were not radically different between the two countries.
• That growth hormone paper acknowledges ANR-15-CE18-0028, the UnmaskingBloodPrions project in which INRA IHAP UMR 1225 was one of five partners under CEA SEPIA coordination from December 2015 for 36 months with 655,720 euro.
• Toulouse led the June 2020 mBio paper showing that prions from sporadic CJD patients propagate as strain mixtures: 29 isolates in human PrP mice resolved into M1CJD and V2CJD, about 35 percent of VV and MV cases carried both, and a V2 targeted PMCA assay found V2 in more than 80 percent of isolates including some that looked like pure M1.
• Toulouse also led the February 2021 Acta Neuropathologica paper reporting prion infectivity in a wide range of peripheral tissues of variant and sporadic CJD patients, at levels that varied unpredictably between tissues and patients, and the June 2025 paper finding the same M1 and V2 strains in 24 E200K genetic CJD cases from Slovakia, Spain and France, with low but detectable peripheral infectivity in five of them.
• Andreoletti is a middle author on the February 2021 Roslin led PLoS Pathogens transfusion study in BSE infected sheep, in which every labile blood component transmitted infection, leucodepletion reduced but did not remove transmission, and blood PMCA detected infection from four months after infection.
• The team page lists among its key publications the 2014 Nature Communications report of evidence for zoonotic potential of ovine scrapie prions and the 2012 PLoS Pathogens report of highly efficient prion transmission by blood transfusion, both from this group.
• A Europe PMC affiliation search on the acronym IHAP returns 25 prion related records from 2011 to 2024, mostly on animal prion diseases; the acronym is not used consistently in the group's affiliation strings, so that count understates its output.

Timeline

1. 2003IHAP founded as a joint research unit on the ENVT campus in Toulouse.
2. 2014Preclinical detection of variant CJD and BSE prions in blood published in PLoS Pathogens, led from Toulouse.
3. 2015ANR UnmaskingBloodPrions starts, 36 months and 655,720 euro, with INRA IHAP UMR 1225 as one of five partners.
4. 2020mBio paper on sporadic CJD prions propagating as strain mixtures published, first and last authors in Toulouse.
5. 2021Acta Neuropathologica paper on wide distribution of prion infectivity in peripheral tissues of variant and sporadic CJD patients published.
6. 2021Roslin led transfusion study in BSE infected sheep published with a Toulouse coauthor.
7. 2021Strain comparison of French and UK growth hormone iatrogenic CJD cases published in Acta Neuropathologica Communications.
8. 2024Blinded comparison of three blood assays in preclinical sheep published in Blood, with an INRAE Toulouse coauthor.
9. 2025Characterisation of prion strains and peripheral infectivity in E200K genetic CJD patients published in Acta Neuropathologica.