Dr. Pierre Alexandre Driguez talked about his work at Sanofi-Pasteur in Paris in a FEB seminar

Today, Dr. Pierre Alexandre Driguez from the company Sanofi-Pasteur in Paris, France, the third doctoral committee member of Dr. Anna Niehues who supported her during her doctoral defense yesterday, was our guest in the FEB (Forschung & Entwicklung Biologie) seminar series of our Faculty. In these seminars, we are inviting guests doing application-related research, often directly in a company. Dr. Driguez guides four research teams in the discovery department of Sanofi-Pasteur, one of which is dealing with carbohydrate chemistry, his original area of expertise. Formerly, he had been working at Sanofi-Aventis in Toulouse on the development of semi-synthetic heparin analogues for medical applications. The synthesis of such heparin oligomers with specific patterns of substitution is tremendously demanding, expensive, and slow. This is why he became part of our European PolyModE project (2009-2013), aiming to establish a chemo-enzymatic process for the production of heparin oligomers with the correct regio-specific sulfation pattern. In his seminar, he now reported on the organic synthesis of teichoic acid oligomers as potential constituents of novel vaccines against Staphylococcus aureus, one of the most important and dangerous bacteria causing nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections. Teichoic acids, which are constituents of the cell wall of Gram-positive bacteria, are unusual polysaccharides, linear polyribitols regio-specifically decorated with N-acetylglucosamine (“chitin-monomer”) residues. Dr. Driguez reported on the successful synthesis of different teichoic acid octa- and nonamers which are now being tested for their antigenic potential.