Inflanet: training future experts in inflammation

[Article] - Published on March 28, 2023 in Major Programs, University-Business Partnerships

Since early 2021, the LPHI laboratory has been coordinating an international project dedicated to studying the inflammation process. Inflanet brings together eight universities and research centers as well as two companies in seven European Union countries. This makes it not only an innovative interdisciplinary research project, but also a training program that includes 15 thesis grants to train future European experts in inflammation.

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

Alongside Georges Lutfalla, director of LPHI, she is also scientific co-coordinator of an ambitious project: Inflanet. "The guiding principle of the Inflanet scientific program is to try to understand how inflammation develops, how, when it is disrupted, it leads to inflammatory diseases, and, of course, to work on finding treatments,"explains Dr. Mai Nguyen.Sheadds: "When exacerbated, inflammation can lead to a wide variety of diseases. That's why it's important to study them."Among the diseases targeted are many cancers, in which inflammation plays a central role, as well as infections, chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), and rare genetic diseases such as type 1 interferonopathies.  

15 doctoral students

Launched in 2021, Inflanet is a European 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 nearly €4 million, Inflanet brings together eight universities, two research centers, and two private companies from seven different European countries: France, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Germany.

These twelve organizations, including industrial partners, must each recruit one or two doctoral students. The University of Montpellier and the LPHI laboratory have even recruited three, bringing the total to 15 future experts in inflammation who will be involved in the project until the end of February 2025.  Coming from different specialties (biology, mathematics, physics, genome studies), they are all participating 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 the participants. This is an opportunity to take stock of the work in progress, but also to encourage interaction while benefiting from learning. The Inflanet collaborative research project also includes a training component designed to strengthen interdisciplinary and intersectoral cooperation.

Mandatory immersion

Thus, a genuine complementary training program to the students' initial training is offered throughout the project through a highly varied schedule of workshops: research management, intellectual property, open science, MOOCs, serious games, writing funding applications, etc. Not to mention in-depth reflections on ethics, responsibility, and diversity in research. Another unique feature of the project is "secondment," a type of supervised internship. "Doctoral students are required to complete at least one secondment , or temporary assignment, in at least one laboratory or industrial partner within the network," explains Veronika Peciarova, Inflanet project manager.  Currently, a doctoral student from the CNRS and a doctoral student from Leiden University in the Netherlands are spending two months in Montpellier, while Resul, a doctoral student in biology from Montpellier, is currently in Bratislava working with a team of mathematicians on the identification of immune cells.

A fruitful immersion on both an individual and collective level. "That's the advantage of interdisciplinarity: there are certain things we don't know how to do as biologists, so we team up with physicists or mathematicians, which opens up new horizons for developing other analytical tools and simply seeing things differently," notes Dr. Nguyen-Chi. As for working with industry, it encourages the development of innovative approaches linked to cutting-edge technologies. The German company Acquifer develops systems for automating drug screening, while the Slovakian company Tatramed offers solutions related to medical imaging analysis. Manufacturers benefit from this collaboration with the academic world to improve their products, creating a virtuous circle that facilitates knowledge sharing and collective emulation.

Dr. Nguyen-Chi explains: "We generate videos related to inflammation, for example to track immune cells such as macrophages or neutrophils, in order to understand how they are recruited, how they activate and disperse. The fact that they disperse is very important for resolving inflammation.Teams of biologists use microscopy to make films that visualize these cells so that mathematicians can then identify the cells and develop tools to track them over time. This helps us understand how they are attracted to a particular site, but also how they can escape from it! Ultimately, the interdisciplinary Inflanet project, which is scheduled to 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 a holistic view and an innovative approach to the inflammatory process. Quite a program.

Keywords: Innovation, Programs, Research, University