The Generative Brain
ANSES Lyon laboratory (French agency for food, environmental and occupational health and safety) logo

ANSES Lyon laboratory (French agency for food, environmental and occupational health and safety)

The Lyon laboratory of ANSES, the French public agency for food, environmental and occupational health safety, is France's national reference laboratory for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in animals, covering BSE in cattle and scrapie in sheep and goats. The prion work sits in its Neurodegenerative Diseases unit, a group of about ten staff with containment level 3 facilities that confirms and types animal prion cases, coordinates the French network of approved TSE laboratories and does research on prion strains, atypical BSE and, more recently, Parkinson disease. Under its earlier name, AFSSA-Lyon, the same site published an early report of atypical molecular patterns in French BSE cases in 2004. It is a co-author institution on the 2015 study that transmitted sheep scrapie to a macaque. This entry is information only.

Key facts

  • ANSES describes its Lyon laboratory as the national reference laboratory for animal TSEs, covering BSE and scrapie.
  • Its reference duties include developing and approving techniques that confirm first-line positive results and type prions at molecular level, coordinating the network of approved French laboratories for animal TSE diagnosis, running inter-laboratory proficiency tests and holding TSE reference materials for those laboratories.
  • The laboratory also runs batch controls of one approved TSE screening test on behalf of the EU Reference Laboratory for TSEs, a role named on the October 2025 page without saying which test.
  • The prion work is done in the Neurodegenerative and Neurodevelopment Diseases unit, which ANSES lists in June 2025 with about ten staff and roughly 500 square metres of conventional and containment level 3 laboratories.
  • The unit's research covers prion strains and molecular phenotyping of abnormal prion protein, with current emphasis on prion disease in elk, alongside work on alpha-synuclein spread and pesticide exposure in Parkinson disease models.
  • The wider Lyon site has nearly 100 staff in five scientific units and also handles antimicrobial resistance, animal mycoplasmas and pesticide resistance; its quality system is accredited by COFRAC to ISO/IEC 17025 under scope 1-2287.
  • ANSES itself was formed on 1 July 2010 by merging AFSSA and AFSSET, so papers before that date carry the AFSSA-Lyon affiliation at the same Tony Garnier address.
  • A 2004 EMBO Reports paper from AFSSA-Lyon found that three French BSE cases showed a prion protein pattern unlike 55 typical cases, with a heavier unglycosylated band and stronger labelling by one antibody, and raised the possibility of a different origin for these cattle diseases.
  • A 2012 ANSES Lyon analysis of 12 L-type and 11 H-type atypical BSE cases found in France from 2001 to 2009 found them at a median age of about 12 years, against about 7 for classical BSE, and argued for keeping BSE surveillance while noting the small numbers.
  • A 2013 study from the Lyon prion unit passaged a classical-like strain that had emerged from H-type BSE in mice and found it kept classical BSE properties, supporting the view that a classical BSE-like strain can arise from H-type BSE.
  • Lyon epidemiologists were first authors on a 2008 survey of 20 European countries that described atypical scrapie as fairly common with a steady prevalence unlike classical scrapie.
  • Europe PMC lists 16 prion, scrapie or spongiform encephalopathy papers with an ANSES Lyon affiliation from 2010 to 2026, including work on CH1641-like scrapie, ruminant TSE transmissibility and an RT-QuIC assay for atypical BSE.
  • ANSES Lyon is one of six institutions on Comoy et al. 2015 in Scientific Reports, which reported transmission of sheep scrapie to a primate after a long silent incubation, alongside the CEA prion unit, INRA-ENVT Toulouse, the Turin zooprophylactic institute, the USDA laboratory at Ames and the Norwegian Veterinary Institute.
  • It is also among the affiliations on a 2017 PLoS One RT-QuIC paper that detected atypical BSE in a French surveillance series and separated sporadic from variant CJD in human samples, with the ICM, the CEA and LFB.

Timeline

  1. 2004AFSSA-Lyon publishes distinct molecular phenotypes in French BSE cases (EMBO Rep 5:110).
  2. 2010ANSES is created from AFSSA and AFSSET; the Lyon site becomes ANSES Lyon.
  3. 2012ANSES Lyon paper on individual factors in French L-type and H-type BSE (BMC Vet Res 8:74).
  4. 2013Lyon unit paper on classical BSE emerging from H-type BSE in mice.
  5. 2015Comoy et al. scrapie to macaque paper published with ANSES Lyon as a co-author institution.
  6. 2017RT-QuIC paper for atypical and classical BSE with ANSES Lyon among the affiliations.
  7. 2025ANSES unit page lists the national reference role for ruminant prion diseases and current research.
  8. 2025ANSES reference page lists TSE duties including EU reference laboratory batch controls.
Sources for this page