SINERGIA Grant Pr Camilla Jandus

Camilla Jandus, MD, PhD, is a tenured Assistant Professor, Head of the “Targeting cytokine secreting lymphocytes (TCSL)” in the Department of Pathology and Immunology (PATIM) at the University of Geneva, and member of the Geneva Centre for Inflammation Research. Her group, in collaboration with Professors Gérard Eberl, immunologist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, and Andrea Serino, neuroscientist at the University Hospital of Lausanne, has been awarded a SINERGIA grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation to investigate the communication pathways between the nervous system and the immune system.

To protect the body from pathogens and infections, the immune system has evolved to discriminate what belongs to the organism (the self) from what is foreign (the non-self, the "other") and thus to tolerate what is "the self", while eventually attacking and destroying what is "the other". The differentiation between self and other is also a key function of the central nervous system: our experience of everyday life is based on a strong sense of our self as distinct from the external world and others, and this representation of self is necessary to guide defensive or approach behaviour.

This project aims to demonstrate a direct relationship between the differentiation between self and other at the level of the immune system and the central nervous system when threats are presented in virtual reality. Among other approaches, participants will be presented with stimuli that represent a potential immunological threat in virtual reality compared to a neutral stimulus. To investigate the response at the central nervous system level, scientists will apply methods from cognitive neuroscience, and to investigate the response of the biological immune system, they will collect biological specimens from humans and mice and assess early innate immune responses and adaptive immunity.

The results of this project will provide a first demonstration of how the differentiation between self and other established by the central nervous system, in terms of neural representations, perception and (re)action, has an immediate effect on the immune response. These findings could have important implications for establishing a link between the behavioural and biological immune systems, helping to launch an entirely new line of research on the crosstalk between neuroscience and immunology that these groups will pursue in the coming years.

Read more about this edition of the SINERGIA grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation here. 

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