Franck HALARY

Comprendre les interactions entre le système immunitaire et des virus opportunistes, modèles in vitro complexes

Franck Halary, PhD, MSc (male)
Position in organisation: Research Associate
- H index: 26 (Google Scholar)
- No. publications: 46 (Pubmed indexed)
- No. citation: 2847 (Google Scholar)
Honours and awards: awardwinner of the Avenir program in 2002 (INSERM, French NIH;
team leader). Franck Halary (ORCID No.: 0000-0003-0336-9615) is currently a Principal Investigator
at the Center of Research in Transplantation and Translational Immunology (CR2TI). In 1996, he obtained
an MSc in Biochemistry followed by a PhD in Immunology in 1999. From 2000 to 2006, he was a postdoc in a
CNRS laboratory in Bordeaux (CNRS UMR5164 CIRID, France) where he worked on nonconventional
anti-viral immune responses in kidney-transplant patients. In parallel, he developed a
research that led to the identification of a dendritic cell-specific lectin as a key attachment receptor for
the cytomegalovirus. In 2007, he was hired as a research associate at INSERM and moved in 2008
to the CR2TI in Nantes. He has a 25-year experience in transplant-related viruses and dendritic cell biology.
He heads the “immunovirology axis” at the CR2TI (approx. 15 PhD students, postdocs, technicians,
scientists and clinicians). He managed several research  projects that led to more than 40 peer-reviewed
articles and organized or co-organized more than ten international/national meetings over the last ten years,
ex: French Dendritic Cell Society, European Macrophage and DC Society, Nantes Actualité Transplantation,
Additive Manufacturing for Health (2024). In 2015, he chaired the 20th NAT conference dedicated to
infectious diseases in transplantation. He has been an elected board member of the French Dendritic Cell Society (CFCD,
https://cfcd.fr/aboutus/board-members.html) from 2014 and 2022. He was a member of the French Society for
Immunology (SFI) in 2015 and 2017. To date, he supervised 5 PhDs, 8 postdocs and more than 20
MSc/MDs or undergraduate students. Since 2007, he peer-reviewed articles for Cell Reports, American
Journal of Transplantation, European Journal or Immunology, Molecular Therapy – Nucleic Acids,
Immunology, Blood Cancer, Current Gene therapy Research, Plos One, Frontiers in Immunology,
Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology and Biofabrication. During this period, he participated to
7 PhD jurys as a reviewer and evaluated grants as a scientific expert for the french Research Funding
Agency (ANR), the Belgian Cancer Foundation, the Dutch Kidney Foundation, the Swiss National Science
Foundation, the MRC UK as well as for french universities and administrations. He also participated to
several national recruitment campaigns for lecturers and also national as well as local science-public meetings
over the past ten years. Since 2021 and up to 2025, he is a workpackage leader of the BIRDIE project,
Bioprinting on-chip microphysiological models of humanized kidney tubulointerstitium, for Nantes Université (https://birdieproject.eu/).
This project is a FET Open project (N°964452), coordinated by the University of Maastricht (Dr Carlos Mota).
In the course of BIRDIE, he has developed an expertise in organ-on-chips, single-cell bioprinting and spatial
transcriptomics on lab-grown, i.e. kidney organoids and native tissues.