Servicenavigation

Project Details

Back

Projekt Print View

SFB 1450:  Multiscale imaging of organ-specific inflammation

Subject Area Medicine
Biology
Chemistry
Term since 2021
Website Homepage
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 431460824
 
Inflammation is a rapid and highly effective defence reaction of the immune system to a variety of harmful stimuli, including infections, tissue damage, autoimmune activities, or cancerous growth. Mechanisms involved limit tissue damage and are important for healing. However, dysregulated inflammation can lead to excessive, chronic, or sometimes suppressed immune responses, playing a significant role in the onset of widespread diseases such as sepsis, rheumatoid arthritis and cancer. Therefore, inflammation must be precisely controlled and timely terminated. Despite intensive research, we lack a holistic view that integrates the myriad of biological processes occurring during inflammatory responses, particularly in terms of their spatial and temporal coordination both locally and systemically, and how these processes are interconnected functionally. This emphasizes the requirement for a currently non-existing in vivo imaging technology, covering various temporo-spatial scales, from molecules over cells to model organisms and patients, i.e., multiscale imaging. In the first funding period, we successfully brought together an interdisciplinary team of clinicians and natural scientists, highly capable of developing and applying innovative in vivo imaging strategies. Inflammatory scenarios were evaluated in first multiscale immune imaging approaches, covering broad temporo-spatial scales ranging from molecular pathways to whole body processes. Methodological projects have laid a robust foundation of chemical, technological and mathematical methods for the detailed visualisation and analysis of the dynamics and interplay of distinct inflammatory cell populations. At the same time, biomedical projects studied molecular pathways during dysregulated immune responses in disease models and patients. Together, we have developed and applied methods to generate, visualize and analyse first multiscale imaging data sets from experimental data of various projects. This also provided an excellent basis for training and promotion of doctoral researchers and Medical and Clinician Scientists at different stages of their careers. In the forthcoming funding period scientists focussing on methodology will refine, combine, and expand their foundational work. These advancements will allow to adapt multiscale imaging to more complex and dynamic preclinical inflammatory models mimicking sepsis, heart and kidney infarction, tumours, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. Our studies will thereby contribute to a better understanding of the interplay between molecular regulators and immune cells at local sites of inflammation in vivo that distinguishes and determines productive versus destructive inflammation. Our ultimate goal is to translate multiscale immune imaging into novel diagnostic tools for patients and to apply imaging to guide existing and emerging therapies.
DFG Programme Collaborative Research Centres

Current projects

Completed projects

Applicant Institution Universität Münster
Participating Institution Max-Planck-Institut für Polymerforschung
 
 

Additional Information

© 2025 DFG Disclaimer / Copyright / Privacy Policy

Textvergrößerung und Kontrastanpassung