A new Medical Research Council Centre of Research Excellence (MRC CoRE) will investigate how the environment interacts with our immune system to trigger chronic inflammatory diseases, such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Chronic inflammation-related diseases have been estimated to cause over half of all deaths worldwide, so unlocking the processes behind these diseases is crucial to saving lives through 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.
The 'exposome' describes the many environmental factors a person encounters throughout their life, ranging from pollution and occupational hazards to diet and infectious diseases. This has a huge impact on health and wellbeing, with an estimated 30,000 deaths attributed to air pollution every year in the UK, and increasing rates of inflammatory diseases in children. However, very little is known about the mechanisms by which the exposome causes disease.
The researchers will initially focus on how air pollution, smoking and viral infections interact with the immune system at mucosal barriers - such as the linings of the lungs and gut - and go on to cause disease symptoms throughout the body. 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 that are more targeted, with fewer side-effects.
The centre will embrace artificial intelligence and machine learning to mine large data sets, such as those from UK Biobank, patient cohorts and longitudinal studies in hospital clinics, and identify common pathways by which environmental factors modulate the immune system. Findings will then be tested through laboratory studies with cells and mice, and by exposing healthy volunteers to common viral infections, or well-defined airborne pollutants, such as diesel fumes and wood smoke, to untangle this complex issue.
Professor Dame Fiona Powrie , co-director of the MRC CoRE in Exposome Immunology, from University of Oxford, said: '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. Our Centre will train a new generation of scientists working across biology and environmental science, future proofing our efforts to combat the health effects of a changing environment.'
Professor Judi Allen , director of the MRC CoRE in Exposome Immunology, from The University of Manchester , said: '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 only got us so far. We need to understand how our environment interacts with our genes to make our immune system malfunction.
'We will benefit from advances in new technologies to identify which of the many complex factors may be important in driving disease, but what's different about our new Centre is we are going to define how the immune system is altered by these environmental factors and how that impacts inflammation. Changing environments, often made worse by socioeconomic disparities and rising pollution, appear to be increasing the rates of these diseases, making it even more imperative to find the causes.'
'We hope to later expand our research to include more environmental factors, such as mould and microplastics, which are growing concerns. An ultimate goal of this research would be to discover the underlying causes of these chronic diseases so we can develop better prevention and treatments.'
Professor Patrick Chinnery, MRC Executive Chair, said: 'This new MRC Centre of Research Excellence will transform our understanding of how lifelong environmental exposures shape immune health and cause chronic inflammatory diseases. With chronic inflammatory diseases posing such a large and growing disease burden, the new centre is well placed pave the way for more effective and targeted treatments.
Alongside exceptional scientific leadership linking two world-leading centres, and strong partnerships with patients and digital health innovators, the scientists' commitment to the next generation of researchers will embed UK leadership in this field, with long-term potential to deliver a transformative, global impact for health.'
