Grant: Operating Grant

Asthma is a chronic respiratory disease, which afflicts patients of all ages, causes important morbidity and mortality and, consequently, generates substantial costs to our society. Although its pathogenesis remains largely undefined, we know that genetic and environmental factors play an important role. In this study, we intend to benefits of two large asthma familial studies from populations that have a common genetic background (French Canadian and French) to integrate the genetics and epigenetics data in aims to increase our knowledge of the impact of genetics and environment in the natural history of asthma. Precisely, we aim to identify rare variants and characterize the epigenetic profiling to integrate the changes in relationship with asthma and allergic condition. With our unique familial asthma collections, new genomic data and novel genomic tools, we are in prime position to extend asthma genomics to unexplored areas. Our preliminary results provide strong indication that new risk factors will be discovered yielding insight to pathogenesis of asthma and offering an original approach to investigate the genetic of frequent disorders.