Maxime Boutier, winner of the McKinsey & Company 2019 Award

Maxime Boutier, who completed his thesis under the supervision of Prof. Alain Vanderplasschen (FARAH/Faculty of Veterinary Medicine) is the winner of the McKinsey & Company 2019 Award. Endowed with an amount of €5,000, this prize rewards the work he carried out in the framework of his doctoral thesis on the development of a recombinant attenuated vaccine against Cyprinid herpesvirus 3, a virus that infects common and koi carp.

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quaculture is a fast-growing food sector that currently produces more than half of the aquatic psecies consumed worldwide. Common carp production accounts for about 10% of freshwater fish farming worldwide. Since the end of the 1990s', this production has suffered significant economic losses due to mortalities caused by an emerging virus: the cyprinid herpesvirus 3 (CyHV-3). It is on this sensitive topic that Maxime Boutier, then a PhD student at the Laboratory of Immunology and Vaccinology (FARAH / Faculty of Veterinary Medicine) reaslized his thesis subject, under the supervision of Pr Alain Vandersplasschen, studying the possibility of developing a vaccine against this virus.

The work carried out by Maxime Boutier in the context of his thesis (defended in 2018) allowed for the first time the identification of an essential virulence factor of CyHV-3 and the demonstration of the potential of deleted recombinant strains for this gene as attenuated vaccines. This work, which has just been awarded the McKinsey and Company 2019 Prize, opens up new prospects for the production of recombinant vaccines against this economically important viruses. Endowed with €5,000, the McKinsey & Company Prize is awarded to researchers who have been able to prove the social and economic relevance of their thesis or its concrete applicability in the one of the following fields of the exact sciences, applied sciences, social, economic or management sciences and biomedical sciences.