The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has awarded a grant totaling $2,619,262 over five years to researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) to find new and better ways to boost the immune systems of infants and young children against invasive infections.
While immunization programs have dramatically decreased the global morbidity and mortality caused by infections. Infectious diseases remain the most frequent cause of death in infants and young children.
“Babies and toddlers are highly vulnerable to invasive infections,” says Octavio Ramilo, MD, chief of the infectious diseases division at Nationwide Children’s, “because they haven’t yet developed protective immune responses, including to vaccines. So they require multiple doses of vaccines to achieve adequate long-term protection.”
To understand the mechanisms behind this vulnerability, grant co-principal investigators Ramilo and JAX Professor Jacques Banchereau, Ph.D., will seek out the characteristic cellular and genomic “signatures” of the infant immune system. The researchers will collect and analyze blood-derived immune cells from infants at 2, 6 and 12 months, conducting longitudinal genomic and cellular studies of immune development and primary responses to routine two-month vaccines.
“The project will yield highly sensitive and complementary datasets that will allow us to correlate immune responses to vaccines with the underlying immune signatures that give rise to them,” Banchereau says, “thereby laying a foundation for new strategies to boost healthy infant immune development.”
Previous studies of the infant immune system have been hampered by difficulty in obtaining clinical samples from infants, the incompatibility of many genomic technologies for use in small-volume samples, and the lack of bioinformatic tools for integrating and interpreting complimentary yet complex datasets.
Nationwide Children’s has access to large infant populations, and the researchers have devised an innovative profiling and analysis process that extracts the maximum information from a single infant blood sample. JAX bioinformatics experts will integrate the resulting datasets “for unparalleled depth of insight into the correlated cellular and genomic signatures of immune development and vaccine responsiveness,” Banchereau comments.
About The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital
Named to the Top 10 Honor Roll on U.S. News & World Report’s 2016-17 list of “America’s Best Children’s Hospitals,” Nationwide Children’s Hospital is one of America’s largest not-for-profit freestanding pediatric healthcare systems providing wellness, preventive, diagnostic, treatment and rehabilitative care for infants, children and adolescents, as well as adult patients with congenital disease. As home to the Department of Pediatrics of The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Nationwide Children’s faculty train the next generation of pediatricians, scientists and pediatric specialists. The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital is one of the Top 10 National Institutes of Health-funded free-standing pediatric research facilities in the U.S., supporting basic, clinical, translational and health services research at Nationwide Children’s. The Research Institute encompasses three research facilities totaling 525,000 square feet dedicated to research. More information is available at NationwideChildrens.org/Research.
The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution based in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center, a facility in Sacramento, Calif., and a genomic medicine institute in Farmington, Conn. It employs more than 2,000 staff, and its mission is to discover precise genomic solutions for disease and empower the global biomedical community in the shared quest to improve human health.
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES
Grant Number: 1U01AI131386-01
Principal Investigators:
Jacques F Banchereau, Ph.D.
Octavio Ramilo (contact), M.D.
Project Title: High Precision System Analysis of Infant Immune Responses