$6.7 million grant to fund search for missing link in allergies
Allergic disorders are a major global health problem, affecting 150 million people worldwide. Currently, asthma and other allergic diseases are not responsive to prevention or early intervention because the disease progression cannot be reliably predicted.
Cincinnati Children’s will receive $6.7 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study why allergic disease progresses and persists in certain individuals. Gurjit Khurana Hershey, MD, PhD, director of Asthma Research, is the principal investigator of the study funded by the grant.
Fifty percent of children with eczema progress to develop asthma, but tools to identify which children are at the highest risk are suboptimal. Khurana Hershey says there is a lack of knowledge about the specific molecular processes that cause epithelial cells to drive persistent allergic inflammation.
“Although epithelial cells are increasingly recognized as critical participants in the propagation of allergic inflammation, therapies that specifically target the epithelium are lacking,” Khurana Hershey says. “This grant brings together experts in eczema, asthma, eosinophilic disorders, epidemiology and public health, immunology, statistics, genetics, bioinformatics, and the human biome to understand how the epithelium promotes allergic disease.”
Epithelial cells form tissues on surfaces of the body cavities to separate them from the outside environment, such as the lungs and gastrointestinal tract.
As part of this new study, researchers are recruiting infants and toddlers from the Greater Cincinnati region with eczema. They will follow these children for four years and will identify the immunologic, clinical, physiologic, microbial, genetic, and environmental factors that predict an allergic progression from eczema to asthma.
According to Khurana Hershey, the study will provide the foundation for developing new computer algorithms to accurately predict the development of asthma among children who have eczema early in life. It also will enable the implementation of novel prevention and treatment strategies.
For more information about the study, including recruitment, call 513-803-8000.
