Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Asthma is a condition in which swelling causes the airway to narrow, making it difficult to breath. Asthma attacks can trigger coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, and can be life-threatening. Asthma is now the most common chronic disease of childhood, affecting 1 in 7 Canadian children, including infants, and asthma is the number one reason for children to be admitted to hospital or to miss school. It is also expensive: the total cost of asthma is estimated at over $2 billion per year in Canada. Treatments can help manage symptoms, but today there is no cure, and no accurate way to predict which children will go on to have lifelong asthma. Our research group, and others around the world, have linked the development of asthma to an imbalance in the types of healthy bacteria in the intestines of infants in the first few months of life (scientists call this community of bacteria in the gut microbiome). This discovery presents a unique opportunity to: (i) identify populations of bacteria that when present in early life can predict risk of future disease; and (ii) understand these bacteria and thus help to develop prevention strategies based on modifying the composition of the gut microbiome. In this research program we will use powerful new genetic sequencing technologies that can profile an infant's entire microbiome from stool samples, and we will use this new knowledge to predict which children will go on to develop asthma. More broadly, our research will guide the development of safe ways to replace missing healthy microbes to prevent asthma from developing in the first place.