The Brain's Essential Role in Mediating Immune Responses: HPA Axis to Leverage Signals with a Systemic Approach

Abstract

While the role of the brain parts on mediating immune response is largely recognized, the neuroimmune pathways are difficult to be explored so they are still poorly understood. The animal knockout models are not always adapted to study the human biology. Because human neuroscience is very sensitive to the psychology, an appropriate way to federate various data and experiments is computational neuroscience. From this perspective our paper introduces an investigation methodology combining a complex landscape of biological signals: neuro-endocrine, lymphatic and neuro-electrical propagation. Having a hierachical HPA axis modelâ as pivotal element of study, we show that previous results about the modulation of the immune response by the HPA axis obtained for murine models can be   scrutinized using 'in silico' human models. This provide a new systemic computational schema to investigate neuroscience paradigms.