Back to home page

PUBLIC HEALTH PROJECTS

Cross-disciplinary approaches

Merieux Alliance

Institut Mérieux: committed to nutrition and health

Preventing infectious or toxicological risks linked to food, providing a high level of safety and quality for these products, contributing to the development of functional foods with health benefits, form one of the priorities of Institut Mérieux.

Mérieux NutriSciences (with its three divisions) and bioMérieux, in particular with its industrial microbiology activities, are the Group’s backbone in this area. Both are world leaders.

  • Mérieux NutriSciences provides services to agri-food and food service companies, and distributors: biological and chemical analyses, R&D, clinical studies, auditing and consulting, training.

  • bioMérieux develops, produces and distributes systems and reagents for in vitro diagnosis used by monitoring laboratories for microbiological quality control in agri-food, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries.

Through these two companies, Institut Mérieux thus provides overlapping expertise to its partners.

Partner of the international MetaHIT program

At the crossroads of nutrition and health, recent scientific work on the human metagenome opens new lines of investigation for research. By joining the international MetaHIT program, Institut Mérieux is committing to a field that offers significant opportunities for tomorrow’s medicine.
This program which unites a number of research and industrial partners aims at improving understanding of the metagenome and its links with health and diseases. Sequencing the human intestinal metagenome should bring the following possibilities:

  • identifying biomarkers for health conditions and diseases,
  • modulating the microbiota to prevent diseases, improving healthcare or providing health benefits through functional foods (for example with probiotics).

This program should be also of particular interest for personalized medicine thanks to the identification of new biomarkers in the field of obesity, diabetes, inflammatory diseases of the digestive track and possibly cancers.
Work on the microbiota should make it possible to assess and predict how it interferes with the immune response to vaccines or immunotherapy products, opening the way to new immunization strategies (new additives).