Seillet - Integrated Mucosal Immunity Lab

Key terms | Research overview | Lab Head | Research themes | Publications

Key Terms

Mucosal Immunology, Innate Lymphoid Cells, Neuroimmune Regulation, Tissue Homeostasis, Chronic inflammation, Circadian Immunology

Research overview

The Integrated Mucosal Immunity Lab, led by Associate Professor Cyril Seillet, investigates how the immune system integrates physiological signals—from diet, neurons, and circadian rhythms—to protect barrier tissues and prevent chronic inflammation and cancer.

Our research challenges traditional views of immunity. Rather than seeing immune cells solely as defenders against infection, we explore how they act as regulators of tissue health, responding to subtle cues in their environment to maintain homeostasis.
This transdisciplinary approach—uniting immunology, neuroscience, metabolism, and bioengineering—is essential to understanding why inflammation goes awry in conditions like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), cancer, and metabolic syndrome. We aim to uncover how these processes can be redirected, rewired, or restored to promote health and improve patient outcomes.

Lab Head

We're always open to collaborations, PhD/postdoc applications, and industry partnerships. Get in touch to join the effort to revolutionize how we treat chronic inflammation and cancer.

Research themes

Decoding how the nervous system shapes immune function in real time.
The immune system doesn’t work in isolation, it continuously senses and responds to signals from the nervous system. We investigate how neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and autonomic circuits regulate immune cells, particularly innate lymphoid cells (ILCs), in mucosal tissues.
Using chemogenetics, neural circuit mapping, and bioelectronic stimulation, we have uncovered how sympathetic and parasympathetic signals tune inflammation and tissue repair. Our work informs the development of neuromodulatory therapies—such as vagus nerve stimulation—for chronic conditions like IBD.
Our goal
Identify neural circuits regulating ILC activity and exploit them to restore immune homeostasis.
Harnessing biological rhythms to optimize immune protection and treatment.
Circadian rhythms govern nearly every physiological process, including immune cell activation, hormone levels, and metabolism. We discovered that ILCs are deeply regulated by the molecular clock, and that disrupting this rhythm exacerbates inflammation and disease.
Our work on IL-22 circadian regulation has opened new avenues in chronotherapy, where treatments are aligned with the body’s biological timing to maximize efficacy and reduce toxicity.
Our goal
Define circadian pathways controlling ILCs and use them to guide timed interventions for diseases like IBD, asthma, and cancer.
Understanding how food-derived signals modulate immune function.
Diet is a powerful modulator of immunity, yet its impact on immune cells and mucosal inflammation remains incompletely understood. We investigate how specific dietary components shape the immune landscape and contribute to either the onset or resolution of inflammation.
Recent work from our lab showed that high-fat meal can impair gut immunity within 48 hours, triggering dysbiosis, barrier dysfunction, and pro-inflammatory gene expression. We are now expanding this research to explore how other dietary patterns modulate gut immune protection, and how feeding cues integrate with neural and circadian signals to coordinate immune responses.
Our goal
Develop precision dietary strategies to support gut health and enhance the effectiveness of immunotherapy.

Recent publications

For all full list of publications, please visit Pubmed.

Department of Immunology

Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences

Seillet - Integrated Mucosal Immunity Lab

Key Terms

Research overview

Lab Head

Research themes

Our goal

Our goal

Our goal

Recent publications