Mickael Audrain, PhD

Dr. Mickael Audrain is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Following completion of his bachelor's degree in Biology and Biochemistry (Nantes University, France), he went to Paris to complete his master's degree in Neuroscience (Paris-Sud University, Paris-Saclay University, École normale supérieure Cachan, France) and his internship in Pr. Alain Prochiantz's laboratory (Collège de France, Paris, France). He then started a PhD in Neurobiology at Paris Descartes University (Doctoral School Bio Sorbonne Paris Cité) and started working on Alzheimer's disease (AD) in Dr. Nathalie Cartier's laboratory at the CEA (the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) in Paris area. As a PhD candidate, he used gene transfer and adeno-associated virus injections to develop and characterize new animal models of AD with a main objective: understand the early stages and the progression of the pathology. During his thesis, Dr. Audrain showed that many events appear long before classical hallmarks of AD. He used these new tools to identify early events likely to account for AD onset, and to find new early biomarkers (Audrain et al. 2016; Audrain et al. 2017). He was also involved in several projects where he used gene transfer as a therapeutic approach to overexpress multiple proteins, such as CYP46A1, sAPPɑ or IL2, and evaluate their therapeutic relevance in AD models (Burlot et al. 2015; Fol et al. 2016; Alves et al. 2017). For his postdoctoral training, he joined Professor Sam Gandy's laboratory in New York City (Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai) and started working on tau and neuroinflammation with the objective of understanding the role of the central nervous immune system during the pathophysiology of AD and associated tauopathies.