Grant: Project Grant - Priority Announcement: Skin conditions

Nearly 1-in-3 Canadians have an allergic disease, such as asthma, food allergy, and eczema. Asthma alone affects 300 million people worldwide, with annual costs over $20 billion dollars. Understanding how and why allergies occur can help us find solutions to this health crisis, and ideally to prevent and better treat these burdensome conditions. Our research program investigates how the immune system causes allergic disease. In this project, we are studying people who have severe allergic conditions caused by changes in genes that control how their immune system works. These conditions are termed primary atopic disorders (or PADs). We will work with clinicians across Western Canada to identify and refer patients who may be suffering from a PAD. We will use advanced DNA sequencing tools to read their genetic material and look for unexpected changes in the DNA sequence (known as "mutations"). If mutations are identified in genes that have not been reported in PADs, we will determine whether these mutations are responsible for the patient's symptoms. Finally, we will analyze data from over 3000 Canadian children who are enrolled in the CHILD cohort to determine if changes in the PADs genes are also associated with common allergic disease. This research is both important and timely. Understanding the causes of PADs will be life changing for the affected patients and their families, and also provides a unique opportunity to understand how changes in the function of the human immune system cause or contribute to allergic disease.