Institut Pasteur scientist awarded the Robert Koch Gold Medal

•    Patrice Courvalin awarded the Robert Koch Gold Medal

The Robert Koch Foundation, founded in 1907, is a non-profit foundation based in Berlin for the promotion of medical progress. It encourages basic scientific research in the field of infectious diseases and exemplary projects designed to address medical and hygiene-related concerns. Each year, the Foundation awards a number of prestigious scientific awards: the Robert Koch Award, one of the highest-ranking scientific awards in Germany, the Robert Koch Gold Medal, three postdoctoral awards for early career scientists and, since 2013, the Prize for Hospital Hygiene and Infection Prevention.

This year's prestigious Robert Koch Gold Medal goes to Patrice Courvalin.

Emeritus Professor at the Pasteur Institute and former head of the Laboratory of Antibacterial Agents and of the National Reference Center on Antibiotic Resistance, Patrice Courvalin is   an expert in the genetics and biochemistry of antibiotic resistance. In particular, with his collaborators, he first described and then elucidated vancomycin resistance in Enterococcus. His research has led to a revision of the dogma describing natural dissemination of antibiotic resistance genes. He demonstrated that a wide variety of pathogenic bacteria can promiscuously exchange the genetic material conferring antibiotic resistance, proved that conjugation could account for dissemination of resistance determinants between phylogenetically remote bacterial genera, elucidated the transposition mechanism of Integrative Conjugative Elements (ICE) from Gram-positive cocci and, more recently, has obtained direct gene and protein transfer from bacteria to mammalian cells. He is the founder and director of the “Interdisciplinary Course on Antibiotics and Resistance”.