News
Claude Perreault Named Knight of the Ordre national du Québec
Published on June 10, 2026
On June 17, Professor Claude Perreault, director of IRIC’s Immunobiology Research Unit, will be awarded the title of Knight of the Ordre national du Québec.
Honoring an Exceptional Builder
The Ordre national is the most prestigious honor awarded by the Quebec government. It celebrates the achievements, careers, and contributions of exceptional individuals who are shaping Quebec’s future.
Professor Perreault, who was also a hematologist at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital until 2018, helped establish IRIC in the 2000s. His internationally recognized research aims to better understand T cells to improve the functioning of the immune system.
As early as the 1980s, Claude Perreault pioneered one of the first bone marrow transplants in Canada to treat leukemia. He once again broke new ground when his team, in collaboration with those of Sébastien Lemieux and Pierre Thibault, searched for—and found—cancer-specific antigens in a little-known portion of DNA known as “junk DNA.”
Since these antigens are numerous, capable of stimulating the immune system, and shared by different types of tumors, they paved the way for the development of therapeutic cancer vaccines. To design these immunotherapies, the company Epitopea was founded in 2021. A first Phase 1 clinical trial for a vaccine targeting ovarian cancer was recently approved and will begin in 2026.
