Thomas Boehm receives Advanced Grant from the European Research Council
The Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen wins coveted grant for his project ImmunoPlast.
The project seeks to explore the extraordinary immune systems of deep-sea anglerfishes to uncover fundamental principles of immune adaptation and tolerance.
Thomas Boehm, Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen, has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for his project ImmunoPlast. The five-year grant will fund a pioneering study into how vertebrate immune systems can evolve beyond conventional adaptive immunity. The project will exploit the remarkable biology of deep-sea anglerfishes to gain unprecedented insights into immune system plasticity, tissue tolerance, and the evolutionary foundations of immune defence. The ImmunoPlast project is supported by the third Advanced Grant awarded to Thomas Boehm for his studies on immune system evolution.
The project focuses on deep-sea anglerfish, whose extraordinary reproductive biology presents one of the most remarkable examples of immune tolerance in nature. In several species, males permanently attach to females and eventually fuse their tissues and circulatory systems. This is a process that would normally trigger a powerful immune rejection response.
Recent studies have shown that some anglerfish species have undergone dramatic immunogenetic changes, including the loss of genes essential for canonical adaptive immune responses. These unique adaptations provide an unprecedented opportunity to understand how vertebrate immune systems can evolve and maintain protection against infection under radically different conditions.
“Deep-sea anglerfishes have evolved immune systems that challenge some of our most fundamental assumptions about vertebrate biology,” said Boehm. “By studying how these animals tolerate tissue fusion between genetically distinct individuals while remaining healthy, we hope to uncover new principles of immune function and adaptation.”
Using comparative genomic, transcriptomic, histological, and mechanistic approaches, ImmunoPlast will explore the evolutionary transition from a conventional vertebrate immune system to a “post-adaptive” state lacking the somatic diversification mechanisms that characterize adaptive immunity.
The findings are expected to provide new insights into immune system plasticity, immune tolerance, pregnancy-associated tissue chimerism, and the biological basis of immunodeficiency. More broadly, the project will illuminate how evolution has shaped the diverse immune strategies found across vertebrate species.
About the ERC Advanced Grant
The ERC Advanced Grant funding is amongst the most prestigious and competitive EU funding schemes, providing researchers with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs. They are awarded to established, leading researchers with a proven track-record of significant research achievements over the past decade.
About the ERC
The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialisation. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Since November 2021, Maria Leptin is the President of the ERC. The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme, under the responsibility of the European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth.