Yann Aquino completed his doctoral thesis at the Institut Pasteur, aiming to disentangle the innate from the acquired in the variability of transcriptional responses to influenza virus and SARS-CoV-2 between individuals and human populations. Among other things, his work has revealed a genetic basis for differences in gene expression between individuals born in Central Africa, Western Europe or East Asia, which includes variants targeted by natural selection or inherited from interbreeding with Neanderthal Man and which, through their regulatory role in gene expression, may explain differences in susceptibility to severe forms of COVID-19 today.
Beyond the physiological context, Yann Aquino has also contributed to elucidating the etiology of pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children with COVID-19 and genetic deficiencies in the OAS/RNase-L pathway. For all this work, Yann Aquino was awarded the Prix solennel de thèse by the Chancellerie des Universités de Paris in 2024, in the Medicine: infectious diseases section.
Today, Yann Aquino continues his research at the Institut Pasteur on genetic predictors of chromatin accessibility in immune cells, and their potential to help elucidate the causality of genetic associations with complex immune traits observed at the organismal level.
Yann Aquino is the winner of the Delheim Award 2025, proposed by Prof. Jean-Jacques Hublin, Chair of Paleoanthropology.