There is increasing interest in the evaluation of prognostic and predictive biomarkers for personalizing care. Reliant biomarkers enable early detection, monitor disease progression and serve as a surrogate of treatment outcome. Individual initiatives have already been undertaken to characterize and analyze biomarkers in the different inflammatory diseases. However compiling, comparing and finding general versus specific schemes of signaling, secretion, expression can only be the result of a shared and interactive network such as INFLAMEX.
1. Ongoing projects and experiments highlight the importance of several cell subsets present in the different diseases and of their extended or reduced lifespan into the sites of inflammation. Those include notably macrophages subtypes, neutrophils, mastocytes or NK T cell subsets. Specific markers of these cell-subsets are currently evaluated by the various partners and should be computed and give support to new functional delineation. Additionally mechanisms underlying the recruitment of these cells to the site of inflammation should be resolved altogether with regulatory crosstalks.
2. Particular emphasis is given within the labex to understand at the molecular level the impact of altered signaling pathways leading to abnormal subcellular addressing, protein stability, transcriptional program or life span. Several proteins and complexes have been identified as nodes in these pathophysiological process and should be at the basis of collaborative approaches between partners. These projects will benefit from the large cohorts from patients at the time of a disease flare and in remission.
3. Analysis of genetic markers that might explain at least partly hereditary of certain diseases will also be investigated and eventually compared between the different pathologies. Once again this approach will take advantage of large cohorts of patients for which phenotypes have been recorded. Indeed, experimental data obtained by partners suggest that manipulating some of these effectors either to increase their basal level or to silence them may be a valuable approach to fight the cause and/or the consequence of inflammation in a selective context. By updating and exploiting a newly generated Inflamexpôle we will compute and use all the high-throughput technologies to use these new markers as possible therapeutic targets but also to generate new cellular or animal models.