Le lundi 12 février 2024, Madame Sara GERDAY, titulaire d'un Master en biochimie et biologie moléculaire et cellulaire, à finalité spécialisée en bioinformatique et modélisation, et d’un Certificat de formation à la recherche en sciences médicales, présentera l'examen en vue de l'obtention du grade de Doctorat en sciences médicales, sous la direction de Monsieur Renaud LOUIS.

Cette épreuve consistera en la défense publique d'une thèse intitulée :

«Caractéristiques cliniques, cellulaires et moléculaires de l'asthme T2»

Le Jury sera composé de :

Michel MOUTSCHEN (Président), Christophe DESMET (Secrétaire), Fabrice BUREAU, Anne-Françoise DONNEAU, Amaryllis HACCURIA (ULB), Renaud LOUIS, Florence SCHLEICH, Camille TAILLE (Hôp. Bichat)

Résumé de la thèse

Asthma is the most frequent chronic inflammatory airway disease with a prevalence reaching 5-10%. Historically, two principal forms of asthma have been described : allergic and nonallergic asthma. In the first section of this thesis, we showed that, while sharing many demographic, lung function and inflammatory features, atopic and non-atopic asthmatic patients showed clear differences with respect to the age of onset, smoking history and FeNO levels. In thesecond part, we focused on eosinophilic asthma, a clinical inflammatory phenotype wherein a significant number of airway or blood eosinophils are present. We demonstrated that the more severe airway eosinophilic inflammation in IgE-low non-atopic eosinophilic asthmatics despite similar treatment with ICS and a higher burden of OCS pointed to a certain corticosteroid resistance in this asthma phenotype. The third part covers mechanistic insights describing how treating severe eosinophilic asthma with biologic therapies alter the molecular milieu in the blood compartment. Our objective was to unravel their longitudinal effects on proteomic and transcriptomic signatures. The last segment addresses the heterogeneity in clinical responses to biologics and reinforces the importance to examine sputum eosinophils in severe asthmatic patients as it was associated with the intensity of response to anti-IL-5(R) biologics.