Asthma Canada, together with the Canadian Allergy, Asthma and Immunology Foundation (CAAIF) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Circulatory and Respiratory Health (CIHR-ICRH), is supporting a research project using CHILD data to investigate the impact of the infant gut microbiome on later asthma risk.
A 2022 Asthma Canada-CAAIF-CIHR Graduate Student Research Grant has been awarded to Darlene Dai, a PhD candidate the the University of British Columbia (UBC), in support of her project “Mining the infant gut microbiota to predict and prevent asthma: data from the CHILD Cohort Study.”
One of Darlene’s supervisors for this project is CHILD Co-Director Dr. Stuart Turvey. Dr. Turvey was a lead investigator in previous ground-breaking CHILD research linking the infant gut microbiome with asthma, and is a PI on a major grant from Genome Canada to further explore the connection.
“My research focuses on discovering and understanding the infant gut microbiome, metabolome, and epigenome compositions that, in combination with host and environmental factors, can predict risk of early-onset asthma,” comments Darlene.
“By using CHILD Cohort Study data, my project aims to develop a precision health approach empowered by ‘omics’ to predict and ultimately to prevent early-onset asthma.”
The Asthma Canada-CAAIF-CIHR Graduate Student Research Grant program awards four one-year PhD-level awards of $30,000 each, to support research into the causes and mechanisms of asthma, improving asthma treatments, and advancing a cure for asthma.
Read about other microbiome-related discoveries enabled by CHILD in the Key Discoveries section of the CHILD website; watch the prize-winning video about CHILD’s microbiome research.