Inflanet: training future inflammation experts

Since early 2021, the LPHI laboratory has been coordinating an international project dedicated to the study of the inflammation process. Inflanet networks eight universities and research centers as well as two companies in 7 European Union countries. Inflanet is not only an innovative interdisciplinary research project, but also a training program with 15 thesis grants to train future European inflammation experts.

It's a scientifically proven fact: inflammation is linked to numerous pathologies, particularly chronic diseases, in the Western world. This has a significant impact on society, both in terms of the quality of life of sufferers and the additional cost of healthcare. Hence the importance of research on the subject. " Many researchers are working on inflammation, and drugs are being developed, yet we don't always fully understand why inflammation is exacerbated in certain pathologies ", admits Dr Mai Nguyen-Chi, a CNRS researcher in the Host-Pathogen Interaction Laboratory(LPHI), which specializes in the study of infectious processes.

With Georges Lutfalla, Director of the LPHI, she is also scientific co-coordinator of an ambitious project: Inflanet. " The main thrust of Inflanet's scientific program is to try and understand how inflammation sets in, how, when it is deregulated, it leads to inflammatory pathologies, and of course to work on the search for treatments ", explains Dr Mai Nguyen. She adds: " When it is exacerbated, inflammation can lead to the development of a wide variety of pathologies . That's why it's so important to study them. Among the pathologies targeted: numerous cancers, in which inflammation plays a central role, but also infections, chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) or rare genetic diseases such as type 1 interferonopathies.  

15 doctoral students

Starting in 2021, Inflanet is a European-scale program that falls within the scope of the MSC-ITN-2020-Innovative Training Networks call for projects. Like all projects supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie international research network, it brings together a consortium of universities, research organizations and companies. With a total budget of almost 4 million euros, Inflanet networks eight universities, two research centers and two private-sector companies from seven different European countries: France, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Hungary, the UK, Spain and Germany.

Each of these twelve organizations, including our industrial partners, has been asked to recruit one or two PhD students, and the University of Montpellier and the LPHI laboratory have recruited three, making a total of 15 future inflammation experts involved in the project until the end of February 2025. With backgrounds in biology, mathematics, physics and genome research, they are all taking part in the collective scientific project entitled "Training European Experts in Inflammation: from the molecular players to animal models and the bedside". Each year, a seminar brings together all participants. It's an opportunity not only to take stock of work in progress, but also to encourage interaction and learning. For the Inflanet collaborative research project also includes a training component designed to strengthen interdisciplinary and intersectoral cooperation.

Mandatory immersion

A wide range of workshops are scheduled throughout the project to complement the students' initial training: research management, intellectual property, open science, MOOCs, serious games, writing funding applications... Not forgetting in-depth discussions on ethics, responsibility and diversity in research. Another special feature of the project is the " secondment ", a kind of supervised internship. " Doctoral students are obliged to spend at least one secondment in at least one laboratory or with one of the network's industrial partners," explains Veronika Peciarova, Inflanet project manager. Currently, a PhD student from CNRS and a PhD student from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands are in Montpellier for two months, while Resul, a PhD student in biology from Montpellier, is currently in Bratislava working with a team of mathematicians on the identification of immune cells.

It's a fruitful immersion, both individually and collectively. " That's the beauty of interdisciplinarity: there are certain things that we biologists don't know how to do, so we get closer to physicists or mathematicians, which opens up new horizons for us to develop other analysis tools, and simply see things differently..." notes Dr Nguyen-Chi. As for working with industry, this encourages the development of innovative approaches linked to cutting-edge technologies. The German company Acquifer is developing systems to automate drug screening, while the Slovak company Tatramed offers solutions for medical imaging analysis. Manufacturers benefit from this collaboration with the academic world to improve their products, a virtuous circle that facilitates knowledge sharing and collective emulation.

As Dr Nguyen-Chi explains: " We generate videos related to inflammation, for example to track immune cells such as macrophages or neutrophils, to find out how they are recruited, how they activate and disperse. The fact that they disperse is very important in resolving inflammation. Teams of biologists use microscopy to make films to visualize these cells, so that mathematicians can then identify the cells and develop tools to track them over time. In this way, we can understand how they are attracted to a particular site, but also how they can escape from it! Ultimately, the interdisciplinary Inflanet project, which is due to come to an end in February 2025, should contribute to the development of new therapeutic strategies, while training a new generation of European experts in inflammation, capable of taking an overall view and innovative approach to the inflammatory process. What a program!