CICRA partners with new £50m Research Centre launched to study how environmental exposures cause chronic inflammatory diseases
A new Medical Research Council Centre of Research Excellence called MRC CoRE in Exposome Immunology will investigate how the environment interacts with our immune system to trigger diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease. The increasing frequency of IBD in children and adults suggests that environmental factors play a key role in the disease, indicating that unlocking the processes behind IBD is crucial for developing better prevention and treatments.
The MRC CoRE in Exposome Immunology will receive up to £50 million over 14 years, leveraging the combined strength of teams at The University of Oxford and The University of Manchester in immunology, big data, and environmental science.
This is an exciting opportunity to bring together complementary expertise in The University of Manchester and University of Oxford to build a multidisciplinary team to tackle this challenge
The 'exposome' describes the many environmental factors a person encounters throughout their life, ranging from pollution, lifestyle factors such as cigarette smoking, diet and infectious diseases. By understanding how the unique combination of a person's genetics and history of environmental exposures drive disease, the researchers hope to develop new drugs. The centre will embrace artificial intelligence and machine learning to mine large data sets, such as those from UK Biobank or longitudinal studies such as the CICRA supported Paediatric IBD bioresource.
Globally we're facing a crisis in chronic inflammatory diseases, such as asthma and inflammatory bowel disease. For decades we've been studying how our genes make us susceptible to disease. While very valuable, genetics has got us so far we need to understand how our environment interacts with our genes to make our immune system malfunction
Through the collaboration of 13 centres of paediatric gastroenteroolgy in the UK and patients, we have collected data and biospecimens of over 670 paediatric IBD patients so far. Those data will be of great value to understand how genes and environmental factors interact to cause paediatric IBD.
Recognising the need to understand the environmental factors CICRA has partnered with the Exposome Immunology project to strengthen research in paediatric IBD and support the perspective of patients.