Marcel Tongo Passo 

Marcel Tongo Passo returned to his home country, Cameroon, in 2018 after his post-graduate training in South Africa. He sought to establish an independent research career, build his own laboratory, and recruit some PhD Fellows. His major interest lies in understanding the mechanisms of strain selection during HIV emergence. The extraordinary diversity of HIV-1 group M poses the most important obstacle to the development of both a cure and an effective vaccine. The Congo Basin area is the epicenter of HIV-1 emergence and has the broadest HIV diversity with numerous recombinant forms and unique strains. It is therefore particularly important to fully understand the biological underpinnings of this diversity: both how it arose, spreads, and impacts the extent and duration of individual sub-epidemics. A successful vaccine and cure strategy has to deal with the issues of HIV emergence and understand the factors governing emergence, as the vaccine formulas should cover all the emergent strains in order for the strategy to be effective.

Tongo Passo also has some interest in monitoring the occurrence of past and current viral zoonoses in the Congo Basin region which has one of the highest human-animals interaction; as the global crisis precipitated by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic clearly illustrates the consequences of a single viral zoonotic transmission into human populations.