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Research Focus
A central paradigm in research on brain body cross talk is that the endocrine, immune and nervous systems engage in multiple interactions during the body’s response to acute and chronic stress, hereby stimulating a series of adaptation responses. These typically include behavioural, cardiovascular, metabolic, endocrine and immunological changes, the latter ranging from immunosuppression to inflammation. Interestingly, the peripheral immune system also regulates the central nervous system, e.g. inflammatory mediators can signal the brain, in consequence influencing behaviour, depressive symptoms and aggravation stress perception.
Several diseases have long been recognized to be triggered or aggravated by psychological stress, such as inflammatory bowel diseases, migraines, allergic encephalomyelitis, asthma and multiple sclerosis. Also, stress perception during pregnancy can trigger pregnancy complications and imprint the fetus to develop diseases in adult life.
As a result of research performed by our group in the area of neuroimmunology, our main scientific achievements of the past 5 years include - the distinct classification of stress-induced challenges of immune privileged sites (intrauterine environment, lung, skin) via neuroimmunological dysregulation
- the identification of impaired intrauterine development and fetal programming of diseases upon exposure to neuroimmunological dysregulation in utero
- the translation of results from basic science into clinically relevant evidence by delineating identical mediators in mice and humans
Hence, our group has defined a growing list of stress mediators in recent years and our short term key objective of research projects is to characterize the hierarchy of such mediators within the stress response cascade in selected clinical pathologies (pregnancy complications, fetal imprinting of adult diseases, skin diseases). Here, descriptive experiments and subsequent functional interventions will initially be performed in murine models. Insights from this basic science approach will be directly translated into testing the clinical relevance of such key mediators in humans. Upon understanding how the brain body cross talk is operational, our long term research goal will be to exploit behavioural strategies for the maintenance of health.
Our present research project are supported by the German Research Foundation, the 6. EU-Framework Program, the Schering Research Foundation, the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Student Exchange (DAAD) and pharmaceutical companies.
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