The Pasteur Institute (French: Institut Pasteur) is a French non-profit private foundation dedicated to the study of biology, micro-organisms, diseases, and vaccines. It is named after Louis Pasteur, who made some of the greatest breakthroughs in modern medicine at the time, including pasteurization and vaccines for anthrax and rabies. The institute was founded on June 4, 1887, and inaugurated on November 14, 1888.

For over a century, the Institut Pasteur has been at the forefront of the battle against infectious disease. This worldwide biomedical research organization based in Paris was the first to isolate HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, in 1983. Over the years, it has been responsible for breakthrough discoveries that have enabled medical science to control such virulent diseases as diphtheria, tetanus, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, influenza, yellow fever, and plague.

Since 1908, ten Institut Pasteur scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology—the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was shared between two Pasteur scientists.

1907: Alphonse Laveran
1908: Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov
1919: Jules Bordet
1928: Charles Nicolle
1957: Daniel Bovet
1965: François Jacob, Jacques Monod and André Lwoff
2008: Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi