Aurélien Olichon obtained his PhD in March 2004 from the University of Toulouse. He worked on the intramitochondrial dynamin, OPA1, linked with type I Dominant Optic Atrophy . Then, in 2004, Aurélien joined Thomas Surrey's laboratory at EMBL in Heidelberg as a post-doctoral fellow. He implemented the selection of camelid antibody fragments (VHH) by phage display. He was able to develop nanobodies targeting several antigens, including microtubules, mitotic spindle-associated proteins, and antibodies blocking rotavirus infection. Since September 2008, he has been an assistant professor in biochemistry and molecular biology at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences of the University of Toulouse. In Prof. Gille Favre's laboratory at the Claudius Regaud Institute and then at the Cancer Research Center of Toulouse (CRCT), Aurélien designed a fully synthetic nanobody library and developed his expertise in recombinant antibody technology. of note, he generated several highly selective nanobodies for the active conformations of RHO GTPases for immunometric assays, intracellular biosensors, and targeted protein degradation. In September 2020, Aurélien moved to the University of La Reunion as an associate professor in pharmacology. He joined the DéTROI laboratory, where he works on engineering nanobody-based biosensors or inhibitors targeting biomarkers of chronic diseases.
