Dr. Hervé Perron, PhD
University of Lyon, France
Chief Scientific Officer of GeNeuro, Switzerland
GVN: Forefront of Virology Webinar Series The Global Virus Network hosts a webinar series for virus knowledge sharing, featuring expert virologists from GVN Centers of Excellence around the world. The topics focus on both the COVID-19 pandemic and other human viral threats, highlighting the latest scientific progress. Each session is a 30-minute live presentation, followed by a 20-minute Q&A hosted by GVN President Dr. Christian Brechot. Dr. Perron Personal Statement: During my PhD, I isolated and characterized a novel retroviral element from Multiple Sclerosis (initially named MSRV), itself defining a novel family of human endogenous elements (HERV-W) that now appears to be implicated in other autoimmune diseases, to be triggered by certain viruses and cells and, recently, to be activated in COVID-19 patients. As an expert at the interface with various scientific and medical disciplines, which I had to learn from and deal with during my career, I reviewed over a hundred manuscripts for over 60 scientific and medical journals. I am author in 96 peer-reviewed publications, 1720 nucleotide and 508 protein sequences deposited in databases (NCBI, 2020 Perron H search). As a member of the Doctoral School of the Lyon University I have directed PhD theses from students in science, but also in medicine, pharmacy and veterinary studies. I am PI of a research program (HERVCOV) funded by a European Union Research Program (HORIZON-HLTH-2021-DISEASE). As Chief Scientific Officer of Geneuro SA, I am actively involved in the research and development for diseases associated with human endogenous retroviruses, such as Multiple Sclerosis, Amyotrophic lateral Sclerosis in collaboration with the NIH/NINDS (USA), and psychoses displaying systemic and brain inflammation with FondaMental Foundation (France and Switzerland). I am currently involved in diagnostic and clinical development with a humanized antibody (temelimab) neutralizing HERV-W Envelope (W-ENV) pathogenic effects, which has been evaluated in Phase II studies in MS. It is currently being evaluated in another phase II clinical trial in patients with long/post-COVID symptoms and a positive antigenemia for the W-ENV protein.