Institut Pasteur in Cambodia, 60 years of History in the Service of Health

On March 11, 2013 Institut Pasteur was celebrating its 60 years in Cambodia. For this occasion, a sculpture of Louis Pasteur made by artists from « Artisans d’Angkor », and an exhibition has contributed to the commemoration of their 60th anniversary.

The Institut Pasteur in Cambodia conducts innovative research combining clinical, microbiological, immunological and epidemiological studies. Its researchers are involved alongside health authorities in the diagnosis of disease agents, in response to epidemics, in studies of risk factors, and prevention.

Advanced technology platforms enable the real-time identification of bacteria, viruses and parasites, and to study the immune responses to infections. Priorities are clinical research in patients with HIV/AIDS co-infection (eg tuberculosis), treatment, prevention of mother to child, research on malaria, its biodiversity, and resistance to antimalarial drugs, epidemiology and virulence markers of virus transmitted by mosquitoes such as dengue and Chikungunya virus (identified for the first time at the Institute 50 years ago), the epidemiological and virological studies of microbes transmitted by animals causing zoonoses (rabies, avian influenza, hantavirus, leptospirosis, Nipah virus and other emerging pathogens). Those researchers are pioneering in the region and are conducted in cooperation with national health agencies, with international organizations (WHO, DHHS, FAO…) and in collaboration with the Institut Pasteur in Paris, the International Network of Pasteur Institutes, the ASEAN region and with many European and American scientific institutions. Scientific work can be carried out with funds obtained from highly competitive project grants, emphasizing the quality of researchers from the Institut Pasteur in Cambodia and their collaborators and the relevance of their scientific work. Pasteur Institute is committed to training young scientists to think and write their projects as well as achieve on the bench and use more and more sophisticated instruments.

This training prepares future generations of young Cambodian researchers to undertake research to fight disease. It is this part of them that depends on the health and prosperity of their people. To conclude and give continuity to the mission of the Institut Pasteur in Cambodia, a sentence of Louis Pasteur could be addressed to researchers: “Science lives of successive data solutions to more and more subtle ‘why’, more and more closer to the essence of phenomena.” It is to search for and find solutions to the great challenges of science for the benefit of health that Institut Pasteur in Cambodia will be sustainable.