Isabelle K. Vila received a PhD in biology from Toulouse University (France). During her PhD she studied the role of an innate immunity receptor in adipose tissue fibrosis during obesity, She did her postdoctoral training at the MD Anderson Cancer centre in Houston (Texas, USA) where she studied a key metabolic regulator in cancer biology, She joined the laboratory of Dr. Nadine Laguette (Molecular Basis of Inflammation) in Montpellier (France) as a postdoctoral fellow before being appointed as a CNRS research scientist. Her current research focuses on the crosstalk between innate immunity and metabolism in general, and in particular the crosstalk between the cGAS/STING pathway and lipid metabolism.

Soumyabrata Guha is a PhD student in the “molecular basis of inflammation” laboratory headed by Dr. Nadine Laguette in Montpellier (France). He holds a master’s degree in Biochemistry and Biotechnology from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and bachelor’s degree in Zoology from University of Delhi (India). His research interests are in the study of the crosstalk between nucleic acid immunity and metabolic pathways.

Assistant Prof Joanna Maria Kalucka is currently at the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University, where she leads a young and dynamic research group. Her independent team focuses on unraveling the metabolic signature of dysfunctional endothelial cells. Prior to being appointed at AU, Dr Kalucka was awarded a prestigious postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders to pursue a project on endothelial cell metabolism in health and disease at the KU Leuven, Belgium. In this work, she identified metabolic adaptations of quiescent endothelium (Kalucka et al., Cell Metabolism 2018), and successfully generated the first murine endothelial cell atlas based on single-cell sequencing data (Kalucka et al., Cell 2020), which now serves as a great resource for the scientific community. Her background as an engineer and biomedical scientist, places her in the unique position to implement truly novel projects and to be an early adopter of cutting-edge and cross-displinary technologies. Dr Kalucka and her team have established an infrastructure to perform single-cell/nuclei/spatial RNA sequencing and she is now using live, in vivo imaging to validate her findings and gain mechanistic insights. To ensure the translational impact of her research, Dr Kalucka also works closely with clinicians at Aarhus University Hospital as well as in other international medical centers.

David Olagnier is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University in Denmark. He received his PhD from Toulouse University in France and completed his postdoctoral training at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute of Florida in the USA and at McGill University in Canada. There, he worked on the identification of the early mechanisms conferring the first line of defence against viral infections and contributed important discoveries to the regulatory control of the antiviral immune responses by the transcription factor Nrf2. In 2016, David extended his international journey by moving to Aarhus University in Denmark where we identified that itaconate, a Kreb’s cycle derived metabolite, suppresses the cGAS-STING antiviral pathway via Nrf2. Unexpectedly, he also demonstrated that this metabolite is a broad-spectrum antiviral and anti-inflammatory agent, especially active against SARS-CoV-2. Now as an independent investigator, his research program focuses on the understanding of the early events involved in the host response to viral infections, with a current focus on oncolytic viruses. His long-term objective is to develop novel biotherapeutic approaches for the treatment of cancer. David has been already locally and internationally recognized for his research through numerous prestigious awards and prizes including a Lundbeck Fellowship, a William Nielsens Award, a Kræftens Bekempelse Young Talented Cancer Researcher Award, an ACS Infectious Diseases Young Investigator Award, a European Macrophage and Dendritic Cell Society Junior Investigator Research Award and an ICIS-Regeneron New Investigator Award.

Nadine Laguette is a research director at CNRS and heads the “molecular basis of inflammation” laboratory in Montpellier (France) that takes interest in uncovering the molecular mechanisms underlying pathological inflammation, She studied molecular biology and genetics at the Royal Holloway college of the University of London (UK). During her PhD in cell biology at the University of Paris V (France) she studied HIV biology. She joined the institute of human genetics in Montpellier (France) as a postdoctoral fellow to work on virus-host interactions, where her work focussed on the identification of restriction factors that operate to hinder HIV replication. She secured a CNRS research scientist position before establishing her own research group. She is the recipient of prestigious awards (Sidaction, Sanofi-pasteur institute, CNRS Bronze medal…) and grants (ERC starting grant, ERC Proof of concept…). Her research interests include nucleic acid immunity, antiviral immunity, DNA damage responses, metabolic regulation - and the ways in which they contribute to inflammatory pathologies, such as cancer and type I Interferonopathies.

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