Meet Arc Core Investigator Christoph Thaiss, a pioneer in the field of body-brain communication

Arc Institute’s 7th Core Investigator, Christoph Thaiss, officially arrived in January, moving cross-country from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was investigating how interactions between the environment, body, and brain impact physiology and disease over the lifespan.

At Arc, and as an Assistant Professor of Pathology at Stanford University, Thaiss will continue to explore how factors like diet, chemicals, temperature, social interactions, the daily cycle of light and dark, and physical activity shape body-brain communication and health.

Learn more about Thaiss below or follow him on social media (@ThaissLab):

1. Why did you choose to come to Arc?

Arc is a very compelling institutional experiment aiming to re-define the way we conduct research in biomedicine. Such opportunities to re-evaluate some of the most fundamental assumptions we have about how scientific research is typically done are extremely rare, but they can be very impactful. Essentially, Arc is asking: If we were to re-design the way we conduct biomedical research, what would we do differently? Being part of this process as one of the early members of Arc is extremely exciting.

2. Tell us about a paper from your lab that is a good example of your research focus?

My lab focuses on bidirectional interactions between environment, body and brain. We believe that many of the most common human diseases are characterized by dysfunctional body-brain communication. Our vision is that by understanding the molecular nature of these dysfunction, we may be able to harness body-brain communication in order to counteract a large number of very common human diseases.

There are two papers that are indicative of our work in this area:

The first one has uncovered a gut-brain signaling pathway that enhances the motivation to exercise (Dohnalová et al., Nature, 2022). Exercise is possibly the single most powerful lifestyle element that protects from neurodegeneration, inflammatory diseases, neoplastic, and metabolic diseases alike. However, the motivation to engage in regular physical activity varies greatly from individual to individual. We found that the exercise-induced neurochemical changes in the brain that regulate the motivation for physical activity are not brain-autonomous but strongly dependent on input from the gastrointestinal tract. We discovered a pathway whereby metabolites produced by the intestinal microbiome are perceived by afferent sensory neurons, relayed to the brain, and regulate dopamine levels in the striatum. This discovery has several important implications for our understanding of exercise physiology, gut-brain communication, and the regulation of dopamine even beyond exercise.

In a different study, we have examined the question why psychological stress functions as a major driver of chronic inflammatory diseases (Schneider et al., Cell, 2023). The epidemiological literature provides ample evidence suggesting that psychosocial stress exacerbates peripheral inflammation, but the underlying mechanisms remain largely unclear. We have uncovered a pathway whereby perception of psychological stress in the brain triggers the emergence of an inflammatory type of glial cells in the periphery which we have termed GAPS (glia associated with psychological stress). These glia drive inflammation by causing myeloid cell accumulation in tissues. This new pathway offers several opportunities for intervention to ameliorate stress-exacerbated inflammation.

3. What new questions do you hope to pursue now that you're here?

Being at Arc provides us with the opportunity to ask much more fundamental questions in our field of research. Rather than pursuing next-step questions, we are now thinking about where we want to be in a few decades from now and plan our research projects as individual milestones to reach these long-term goals.

We hope to achieve this goal with a combination of two approaches: One the one hand, we will be able to use technologies and methods developed by our colleagues at Arc, which will lead to truly interdisciplinary strategies that we could not have developed before we joined Arc. On the other hand, we also hope to inspire other scientists at the Institute with the specific questions we pursue, leading to a much broader collective of minds and talents that jointly tackle some of the most mysterious aspects of human disease.

4. What do you want Arc's community to know about you and your team?

We are a very diverse group of scientists with backgrounds as physicians, biologists, and computer scientists, and the lab is interested in many non-overlapping fields of biology. As a result, we are extremely collaborative, bridging approaches from theoretical work to in vitro screens, animal experiments, and human cohort studies. Almost every single one of our projects is the result of numerous teams working together. We are always open to new projects outside of the mainstream of our lab, so please reach out if you’d like to work on an idea together.

Thaiss received his undergraduate training from the University of Bonn, Yale University, ETH Zurich, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Following his Ph.D. studies at the Weizmann Institute of Science, he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Among the recognitions he has received for his work are an NIH Director's New Innovator Award, an NIDDK Catalyst Award, a Pew Biomedical Scholars Award, the Science & SciLifeLab Grand Prize for a Young Scientist, the Agilent Early Career Professor Award, a McKnight Brain Research Foundation Innovator Award, and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Award.