Celebrating excellence: Nader Yatim awarded a prestigious 2026 ERC Starting Grant
Updated: Sep 17
By Nazaré Guimard, Head of the Grants Office
We are thrilled to announce that Nader Yatim, Head of the Myeloid Biology in Ageing and Disease group (G5), has been awarded a 2026 European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant.
This prestigious award recognizes Nader's ambitious and high-risk research proposal, HERITAGE, which aims to uncover fundamental mechanisms driving hematopoietic aging and disease.
The ERC Starting Grants are among the most competitive funding schemes in Europe. They are designed to support excellent early-career researchers (with 2–7 years of experience post-PhD) who have already produced significant supervised research and are ready to lead their own independent teams.
On September 3, the ERC published its latest selection list, choosing 421 outstanding researchers. Of those 38 are affiliated with French Host Institutions ranking France third among awardee nations. Nader Yatim was among these 38 French recipients, highlighting the outstanding research being done at our institute.
The HERITAGE Project: Decoding Hematopoietic Aging
Hematopoietic aging is a major driver of morbidity and mortality worldwide. As we age, our blood production system (hematopoiesis) often skews toward pathological myelopoiesis, a process linked to clonal hematopoiesis, metabolic changes, and epigenetic remodeling. However, the precise molecular links between these alterations and inflammation remain largely unknown.
Nader's project, HERITAGE (Mechanisms and Consequences of Retroelements Dysregulation in Hematopoietic Aging and Disease), proposes a groundbreaking hypothesis: the aberrant expression of transposable elements (TEs), normally silenced by epigenetic safeguards, is a central mechanism driving hematopoietic dysfunction, maladaptive myelopoiesis, and tissue injury in aging.
Over the next five years, Nader and his new team will pursue an integrated strategy combining state-of-the-art mouse models, human cohorts, and cutting-edge single-cell and spatial transcriptomics:
Mapping TE Activity: Creating a comprehensive atlas of transposable element activity across hematopoietic differentiation and the lifespan, and dissecting how TE sensing modulates cell fate in genetic models.
Identifying Epigenetic Drivers: Investigating how recurrent mutations in epigenetic regulators (such as DNMT3A and ASXL1) and age-related declines in polyamine synthesis lead to chromatin remodeling and TE reactivation.
Translating to Human Health: Characterizing immune responses during healthy aging and leveraging a unique cohort of patients with late-onset systemic inflammatory diseases (LA-SID) to establish the clinical consequences of TE dysregulation.
The HERITAGE project promises to delineate a unifying mechanism of hematopoietic aging, uncovering critical links between epigenetic erosion, retroelement activation, and immune dysfunction. Ultimately, this work could pave the way for innovative interventions to reduce the burden of aging and chronic inflammation.
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