IGI Seminar Series: Microbial Future Proofing: How Infant Microbiomes Shape Childhood Allergy and Asthma

Summary

The prevalence of allergy and asthma has increased significantly over the last several decades. This is particularly true in industrialized nations where early life environmental exposures are strong predictors of disease development in later childhood. Studies examining both the infant gut and the airway microbiota have now demonstrated that early life perturbations in microbiome composition and metabolic productivity precedes allergy and asthma development in later childhood. Functional studies based on these observations has led to the identification of specific gut microbial genes and products in the infant gut microbiome that not only predict disease development in childhood but also drive maladaptive immunity characteristic of established disease. These studies suggest that interventions to engineer early life microbiomes may prevent allergy and asthma development.

Speaker

Susan Lynch – Inventor of Siolta’s technology, Susan is Professor of the Department of Medicine and Director of the Colitis and Crohn’s Disease Microbiome Research Core at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Susan, a key opinion leader in the microbiome field, has participated in countless National Institute of Health and National Academy of Science panels, published over 75 scientific articles in top tier journals (e.g., Nature Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), and collaborated on some of the nation’s largest efforts involving multi-center pediatric asthma cohorts. She has been recognized as one of Foreign Policy’s Global Thinkers of 2016 and named one of the American Society of Microbiology’s Distinguished Lecturer for 2017.