Next generation immunology research (NEXTIMMUNE2)

The last 150 years of research in immunology have led to our current understanding of the human immune system and our ability to manipulate its function therapeutically. Immunology has always been at the crossroads of biomedical research, providing both crucial information on basic biological processes and on clinical application. The future of immunology also lies in the integration of several interdisciplinary research fields. This will help to understand the immune system as a central component of the body that link different physiological networks to maintain cellular homeostasis. The education and training of future researchers must take place at the interface of traditionally separate disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, biology and epidemiology, with the aim of linking them together. This will provide the basis for a transition to personalized medicine and is important to enable healthy living as well as healthy aging. This development will be supported by the use of largescale data sets that allow diseases to be classified by their molecular nature rather than symptom-based. High-throughput technologies can generate a large amount of immune-associated data on a genome wide scale. It is therefore essential to use these data in system based approach to analyze, predict and evaluate the function of the immune system. This research program focuses on two aspects of immune regulation that have the potential to broaden our global understanding of the body’s immune response. Immunometabolism and systems immunology approaches can be applied to different models and disease states, leading to a truly holistic understanding of immunology on the cellular, organ and organismal level. Systems biology approaches have the potential to make a significant contribution to the understanding of disease mechanisms based on an iterative process of quantitative data collection, computational modeling, and experimental validation of the proposed hypotheses. Our understanding of these processes has increasingly benefited from the significant advancement of multiple high-throughput technologies (“Omics”) in the recent years. However, because of this development, immunological research is facing new challenges. In the “omics” era of life sciences, we are faced with steady increasing amounts of data to process. The combination of information science and hypothesis-driven research is the most promising approach that will culminate in the development of innovative solutions for personalized medicine. Building on our first NEXTIMMUNE PRIDE program, we propose to continue with this multidisciplinary training program for PhD students in immunology research in Luxembourg. This proposal takes advantage of the network and expertise generated in NextImmune, which was built on the path leading from big data to personalized medicine, and focusses on open questions in immunology. Through our multidisciplinary education program, we aim to train the next generation of scientists to meet the challenges of an ever-changing scientific world.