Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

The extreme preterm infants, born at 28 weeks old or less, have been a new population reality for about three decades. As a medical community we strive to increase their survival rate, but what do we do for their quality of life? These children are here, they have survived and now they are a stratum of society in need of help to live a normal life, a life with full physical and mental capacities. To do this, as researchers we must understand everything that can influence their future neurodevelopment. It is well known that the fact of getting an infection following childbirth or during the ICU stay in neonatalogy unit induces widespread inflammation in these infants and increases their risk of suffering long-term cognitive or motor sequelae. In addition, it has recently been demonstrated that premature infants have certain immune deficiencies making them more susceptible to severe infections. But how does this infection modulate their developing brain? Are some children are more fragile than others? Does gestational age influence their risk? Through this project, we want to answer these questions using animal models to demonstrate how brain gene expression is modulated by inflammation. Furthermore, we want to replicate in mice the immune deficiency seen in premature infants and expose them to infection in order to better understand the susceptibility of this population. This research will thus develop new therapeutic targets to help premature infants fight infections with more success and improve their neurological and motor outcomes.