© Dragana Gordic/stock.adobe.com
In response to an infection or physical injury, the human body often triggers an inflammation. At some point, this response needs to be shut down to avoid chronic inflammation, which can lead to persistent fatigue, joint and muscle pain, and gastrointestinal issues.
“While medication exists to reduce chronic inflammation, this can have negative secondary effects that limit their usage,” explains INFLANET(opens in new window) project deputy coordinator Georges Lutfalla from the University of Montpellier(opens in new window) in France. “There is a clear need to find new solutions to better manage this condition.”
The EU-funded INFLANET project, which was supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions(opens in new window) programme, sought to train young scientists to become future experts in this field. Scientists from very different fields of biology, including structural biologists, bioimagers, immunologists and geneticists, were brought together with mathematicians, programmers and modellers. The intersectoral training also sought to foster business thinking and entrepreneurship.
New approaches to understanding inflammation
The project covered four key areas, the first of which was to identify new molecular processes at work in inflammation. Researchers looked at how these processes are involved across different models, and sought to identify how they trigger inflammation or how their structural properties could influence their action on inflammation.
Secondly, new tools to visualise inflammatory processes within living animals in real time were developed. This was achieved through new transgenic lines to report different inflammatory conditions, as well as new microscopes to enable better imaging.
“Researchers also worked on new genomic strategies to look for genes involved in chronic inflammatory diseases in human populations,” says Lutfalla. “Software was developed to analyse medical images from patients suffering from inflammatory diseases.”
Finally, new mathematical strategies were applied to analyse results from the experiments, and to model inflammatory processes. A key aim of this was to reduce the need for animals in future experiments.
Breakthroughs in inflammation research
The work carried out in the project has led to a number of important discoveries. “From a patient-oriented point of view, we were able to identify a new human mutation responsible for a very severe inflammatory disease called interferonopathy,” adds Lutfalla.
“This could open the door to new rapid genetic testing. This could be used, for example, to inform parents of the probability that their children might suffer from this disease, enabling them to be offered adapted therapies still to be discovered.”
Automated analysis of imaging data has also been pioneered. These diagnostic software systems could soon be made available to hospitals. The project also advanced new animal models of human inflammatory diseases, which could eventually be used to find new drugs to treat patients.
Training scientists of the future
These results will have important clinical impacts in the near future, Lutfalla believes. Moreover, the training of 15 young scientists over the past four years will help to ensure that the advances made in understanding and treating chronic inflammation will be sustained over the long term.
“In addition to the discoveries that have been made, a major impact of INFLANET will be the future achievements of the 15 young scientists that we trained,” says Lutfalla.
Discover other articles in the same domain of application