Ana-Maria is an outstanding cell biologist and immunologist, who is currently leading the INSERM U932 unit (Immunity and cancer) at the Curie Institute.
Her team is interested in the spatiotemporal dynamics of migration and function of immune cells in tissues. The team aims to decipher the cellular and molecular mechanisms that allow our immune sentinels (macrophages, dendritic cells: DCs) to carry out their functions.  She elegantly contributed to show how colon macrophages combat fungal intoxication, revealing an unexpected and essential role of macrophages in the maintenance of colon-microbiota interactions in homeostasis.
Recently, Ana Maria has brought to the forefront the migration of DCs from basics to applied cancer immunotherapy by showing that pharmacological activation of the lysosomal TRPML1 calcium channel promotes DC migration and sensitizes resistant tumors to an-PD-1 therapy.
More recently, Matthieu Piel and Ana-Maria Lennon-Duménil’s teams highlighted by using a series of creative and technically challenging in vitro assays,that physical constraints of cellular environment regulate immunity elicited by homeostatic tolerogenic DC trafficking to the lymph nodes, the sites of initiation of the immune responses. They demonstrated that mechanical deformation of the cell, and more specifically the nucleus, induced a change in DC speed. This ground-breaking work established an initial link between the mechanical forces exerted on DCs and their surveillance and migration activity.

Her research thus covers a large field at the interface of Biophysics, Cell Biology, Immunology, Cancer, Gut Barrier-Microbiota. Her talk will be of great interest and relevance for many researchers within our different research axes at the institute.

Ana-Maria Lennon Duménil is invited by Fatah Ouaaz.