Immunology

Description and Mission

Building on the expertise of our partners in nephrology, vascular and cardiac biology, as well as pulmonary biology, we will develop innovative approaches to identify the early events that trigger the inflammation–remodeling–fibrosis axis across different organs.

We will create a unique patient biobank with pathologies related to this axis, affecting multiple organs, in order to identify both common mechanisms and specific pathways of lesion development. A standardized workflow for sample processing and analysis will be implemented to enable inter-group comparisons.

Our focus will be on early immune responses in patients, through the analysis of blood and tissue samples, in order to determine potential triggering events of the inflammation–remodeling–fibrosis process.

In the kidney, we will study the initial interactions between inflammatory fibroblasts and macrophages, identified as predictive of renal fibrosis. We will also explore non-invasive detection methods for inflammatory fibroblasts, drawing on existing cohorts and biobanks. We will also assess whether their presence can predict poor prognosis in other organs (lung, heart, liver, post-renal transplantation).

Given their central role in inflammation, remodeling, and fibrosis, better characterization of inflammatory fibroblasts represents a major and promising scientific challenge.

We will also study how severe and/or chronic inflammation can lead, even years later, to tissue remodeling and fibrosis, in pathologies such as asthma, atherosclerosis, or autoimmune diseases. By leveraging clinical cohorts and national databases (SNDS, EDS), we will seek to identify modifiable factors associated with these phenomena, using artificial intelligence and data science approaches. Furthermore, through artificial intelligence and deep learning applied to clinical data and ultrasound images, we are currently developing predictive markers and diagnostic tools for post-infarction fibrosis and cardiac amyloidosis. This latter approach aims to enable early screening for cardiac amyloidosis in non-expert centers, and to propose appropriate therapeutic management before the onset of irreversible cardiac damage.