Project description
Immune adaptation in skin during pregnancy
The immune system is designed to detect and eliminate anything perceived as ‘non-self’, such as viruses, bacteria and even transplanted organs. However, there are rare natural exceptions where the immune system must suppress this response to protect ‘foreign’ tissues, with pregnancy being the most striking example. At the same time, this must not compromise the mother’s ability to fight infection. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SkimmunePreg project aims to investigate this delicate immune balance in the skin. Using advanced transcriptomics, researchers will map immune cell behaviour in healthy and inflamed skin, focusing on regulatory T cells and dendritic cells. Project findings may unveil key pathways that help predict or prevent pregnancy-related inflammatory skin conditions.
Objective
A successful immune adaptation to pregnancy is essential to support mammalian reproductive fitness. Pregnancy presents a immunological dilemma where the maternal immune system must tolerate fetal antigens while maintaining its main protective functions. How the maternal immune system navigates these opposing demands and adapt to pregnancy remains largely unclear. This question is of importance at barrier sites such as the skin that represents a primary portal of infection and inflammatory disorders. Clinical observations support the idea that skin physiology and immunity are altered during pregnancy. Using experimental models, the host laboratory uncovered a remodeling of skin immunity during pregnancy associated with a significant increase in regulatory T cells and an altered dendritic cell network. The goal of our proposal is to understand how pregnancy impacts human skin with the ultimate goal to develop approaches to mitigate inflammatory responses during this critical stage. More specifically, this project aims at exploring how pregnancy impacts human skin immune landscape and putative function both at steady state and in the context of inflammation. This high dimensional analysis will be performed using high resolution transcriptomic technologies including single cell ATAC / RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics. My expertise in these approaches will enable me to uncover underlying putative signalling pathways underlying immune cell changes and highlight pregnancy associated altered cell interactions. Candidate pathways will be validated using organoids mimicking pregnant skin. The generated data are expected to capture, for the first time, how the skin adapts to pregnancy. This work may provide fundamental insights into our understanding of maternal immunity and would potentially enable risk prediction and alleviation of inflammatory skin conditions that can appear or be exacerbated in pregnancy.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine obstetrics
- medical and health sciences basic medicine physiology
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics RNA
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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75724 Paris
France
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