Add metabolism to the end of the Greek root for blood (haima) and it means “the sum of chemical changes within the blood” by which energy is made available to maintain an efficient immune system. Although metabolism and inflammation are essential to survival, involving all tissues throughout life, we still know very little about how these processes influence each other and what can perturb their equilibrium.
In our Western society, our blood is exposed to a list of risk factors that influence the metabolism of our immune system such as the Western pattern diet, environmental perturbations (exposome and endocrine disruptors) and stressors (fight-or-flight response, biological stressors and psychological stressors).
Our research program primarily focuses on how the metabolism of the hematopoietic system gives rise to an efficient immune system and how it can be deregulated by various environmental cues in chronic inflammatory cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Our team is dedicated to identify novel metabolic pathways that could act independently or in synergy on the fate and behavior of our immune system with the hope of identifying new candidate targets for therapeutic interventions or new predictors of disease outcomes.