Camila Consiglio: Understanding the role the immune system plays in fertility
Project title: Fertilimmune
Can you briefly tell us about your research project and the problems you aim to solve?
"Infertility affects 1 in 6 adults worldwide. Current infertility therapies overlook its underlying causes, resulting in pregnancy success rates as low as 30%. Together with the emotional, financial, and societal toll of infertility, this low efficacy underscores the urgent need for more precise interventions. It is becoming increasingly clear that reproduction and immunity are deeply intertwined, making the immune system a promising target for fertility treatment. A successful pregnancy requires coordinated local and systemic immunological adaptations starting even before conception. This is because pregnancy is a dramatic immune challenge for the mother: the maternal immune system must simultaneously tolerate the semi-allogeneic fetus, while being able to mount immune responses to protect the mother and fetus from potential infections. Yet, major gaps still exist in how the immune and the reproductive systems regulate one another, and impact pregnancy outcomes. My ERC Starting Grant project “fertiliMMUNE” aims to uncover mechanisms of human immune-reproductive crosstalk and define novel targets for fertility treatment."
What inspired you to start working on your research?
"I deeply care about promoting more equitable care in medicine. The immune system is central to human health, protecting us against disease while simultaneously regulating crucial aspects of health, such as reproduction. What inspired me to start working on my research is the interesting observation that the immune system functions quite differently between men and women. For instance, immune-mediated diseases show clear sex differences, with men experience more severe infections and higher cancer rates, while women have stronger vaccine responses and greater risk of autoimmunity. Yet, treatment strategies for such diseases still neglect biological sex and contribute to widening disparities in health outcomes between men and women. Over the past 10 years, my research has been building on understanding mechanisms of sex differences in immunity, where sex hormones such as testosterone and estrogen have emerged as powerful regulators of immune cell function. These same hormonal pathways that create differences in immune function between men and women are also critical during reproduction, where finely tuned immune adaptations are essential for pregnancy success. fertiliMMUNE therefore aims to uncover how sex hormone–driven immune mechanisms shape fertility and pregnancy outcomes, ultimately defining novel targets for immune-informed fertility treatments that can improve success rates and reduce the heavy burden of infertility."
What does the ERC grant mean to you?
"The ERC starting grant represents a unique opportunity to pursue this ambitious, high-risk research that would not be possible through other funding mechanisms. The questions at the heart of fertiliMMUNE—understanding how the immune-reproductive crosstalk shape immunity and reproduction in humans— are complex and require a multidisciplinary approach, extensive resources, and a dedicated team working together over several years. With the support of the ERC, I can bring together diverse expertise, build the necessary infrastructure, and lead a research program with the depth and continuity needed to tackle these challenges. The ERC starting grant will make it possible for us to advance our understanding of immune–reproductive crosstalk, and pave the way for more precise, equitable, and effective fertility treatments that could transform care for millions of people worldwide."
Jacob Vogel: Simulations of Alzheimer’s disease at the individual level
Project title: TauTime
Can you briefly describe your research project and what inspired you to start working on it?
“In this project, we will take known or hypothetical biological mechanisms describing how Alzheimer’s disease (AD) spreads through the brain and combine it with data measured from real human AD patients, and build this into a computational simulation of the full AD process. This simulation can serve as means of performing certain types of mechanistic experiments that would not be possible to do in actual humans. We will also work to individualize these simulations (sort of like the popular digital twin concept) in order to forecast the future progression of the disease at the individual patient level.”
What is the specific problem or need that you and your team members are trying to solve or address with your research?
“The motivation for this project came from how hard it has been to model AD in vitro or in animal models. It is such a complex disease and, as far as we know, only humans get it. But of course, mechanistic experimentation is often not possible in humans. So, it has for a long time been a goal of mine to create a mechanistically accurate computer simulation of the AD process in humans, built using human data. We already have basic models that work surprisingly well. The goal for the ERC project is to advance these models to a point where they can be used to two things: 1) generate and test new mechanistic hypotheses, but in a context that we hope will be relevant to human disease and treatment; and 2) forecast the future progression of an individual patient, in a manner that could aid ongoing clinical trials or even patient management in memory clinics.”
What does a ERC Starting Grant mean for this particular project?
“The ERC StG is a very generous award and so what it means most directly for the project is that we will have access to the personnel and compute resources that will really be necessary to do this project the right way. This is very encouraging, because we want this model to not just be successful as a proof-of-concept, we want it to be meaningful and useful to society. That sort of thing takes a lot of time and resources, this award will provide that. More broadly, it means that there is interest among other European scientists in human AD research, and in computational and data science approaches to medical and life sciences.”
Anything else you would like to add?
“Just that this award, while pitched as a personal achievement award, is really the culmination of many contributors. Any achievement I’ve had in my career has been dependent on having inspiring mentors, clever and supportive colleagues, and very bright trainees. Not to mention all the important work done by other scientists getting us to where we are now. So, I would just like to acknowledge the many wonderful scientists who have contributed in some part to my own achievement, as well as my incredibly supportive wife and family. I don’t believe there is such a thing as individual achievement in science.”