Cader lab

Molecular Nutrition and Immunometabolism Laboratory

Nearly half of the world’s adult population is overweight. What are the consequences of this nutritional overload and the modern-day diet for our immune system?

We study how our body stores and utilises energy to fuel immunity, and how this is further shaped by the myriad of dietary components and their metabolites we are constantly exposed to. 

The cells in our body perform hundreds of different chemical reactions. These convert food into energy and a vast array of chemicals needed to sustain life. Collectively, this process is known as metabolism and underpins every biological process from growth to cell death.

When metabolism is perturbed, for example through modifying our diet, this can have a huge impact on how our cells function. Indeed, metabolic dysfunction is an early and important change seen across all the major diseases of the 21st century from diabetes to cancer to dementia. It also occurs during ageing. In most cases, we do not know exactly what causes this dysfunction.

However, our energy intake and how our body processes those dietary nutrients is increasingly appreciated as one of the most important regulators of how our organs function. In the immune system, metabolism balances the strength of our response to infection to prevent inappropriate activation and damage to our own body. 

We want to understand how metabolism is coordinated at different sites in the body, especially in immune tissue such as lymph nodes or the intestine. We want to know why this goes wrong and what problems this causes.

One of the most important consequences of metabolic dysfunction is that it can lead to an imbalance of antioxidant and free radical chemicals. We have previously shown that this can cause stress in immune cells, which triggers their activation, leading to autoimmunity and chronic inflammatory diseases such as Crohn’s disease. We are trying to learn more about this and other forms of metabolic stress.

One of the challenges is that there have been few tools for studying metabolism in individual cells dynamically over time and in their native tissue contexts. We combine state-of-the-art experimental techniques across imaging, mass spectrometry, and genetics to investigate the complex interplay between diet, metabolism, and immunity.

Through studying these connections, we aim to gain a better understanding of the fundamental role nutrition and metabolism plays in maintaining a healthy body and immune function. We hope to learn how a nutritional oversupply of energy and societal shifts in diet may be triggering the current and alarming rise in incidence of autoimmune and chronic inflammatory conditions. Importantly, we seek to establish whether we can modify our diet to safeguard against the development of these diseases, as well as discover novel disease-relevant biology that could pave the way to new treatment strategies.