Mapping immune responses: a DocTIS thesis on understanding human inflammation
On December 12th, 2024, Laura Jiménez Gracia, a computational biologist involved in the DocTIS project, successfully defended her doctoral thesis titled “Towards a large-scale human inflammation atlas at single-cell resolution” at the University of Barcelona (UB), following 4 years of research in the Single-Cell Genomics Group at the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG).
The doctoral thesis was directed by Prof. Dr. Holger Heyn, group leader of the Single-Cell Genomics Group (CNAG) and principal investigator from CNAG in the DocTIS project, together with Dr. Ivo Gut, director of CNAG, and tutored by Prof. Dr. José Francisco Abril Ferrando, professor and group leader from UB.
This PhD defence represents an important outcome of the DocTIS project. Through her work, Laura contributed to building a large-scale single-cell reference of human immune activity, providing a valuable resource to better understand how immune processes vary across diseases and to support future diagnostic and therapeutic advances.
Insights from the research
Reflecting on her work, Laura Jiménez Gracia said: “Our goal was to create a comprehensive view of how the immune system behaves across many diseases. By studying its activity at the level of individual cells, we can uncover patterns that were previously hidden and bring us closer to more precise and effective treatments”.
Inflammation protects the body against infection and damage, but when it becomes chronic or uncontrolled, it contributes to many conditions including autoimmune, liver, and cardiovascular diseases. To explore these processes in greater depth, Laura and her collaborators used single-cell sequencing technologies to analyse millions of immune cells from more than a thousand patients affected by different inflammatory disorders.
This large-scale approach revealed how immune cell types such as lymphocytes, or myeloid cells change their activity depending on disease context. The resulting human atlas of inflammation highlights shared and disease-specific immune mechanisms and identifies potential molecular biomarkers that could aid diagnosis or guide therapy.
Contribution to DocTIS objectives
The research directly supports the mission of DocTIS to improve the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of immune-mediated diseases through large-scale, data-driven approaches. The atlas developed by CNAG researchers provides a reference framework that offers a basis for comparing immune responses across different diseases and an approach to uncover disease-specific molecular signatures that may inform new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies.
This work exemplifies how DocTIS fosters scientific excellence and collaboration, linking molecular discoveries to future clinical applications and advancing the development of precision medicine.
Read more
The full doctoral thesis, “Towards a large-scale human inflammation atlas at single-cell resolution”, is available in the digital repository of the University of Barcelona: https://diposit.ub.edu/dspace/handle/2445/218700.
Coordinated by the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute, VHIR (Sara Marsal), the DocTIS consortium brings together Cardiff University (Ernest Choy), the University of Verona (Giampiero Girolomoni), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Britta Siegmund), the Institut d’InvestigacionsBiomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer, IDIBAPS (Pere Santamaria), the National Center for Genomic Analysis, CNAG (Holger Heyn), IMIDomics Inc. (Manuel Lopez-Figueroa), HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (Richard M. Myers) and Zabala Innovation.
