Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine have received a five-year, $7.07 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how early-life exposures in the home influence a child's risk of developing food allergy.
Food allergy affects an estimated 5 to 10 percent of children, yet the environmental factors that raise or lower risk remain poorly understood. The team will analyze dust samples collected from the homes of infants in the SUNBEAM birth cohort, beginning before birth. They will measure food allergens, microbial products, and microbes in the dust and determine whether these exposures are linked to food allergy development in the first year of life.
The project is led by Johanna Smeekens, PhD, assistant professor of Pediatrics; Tim Moran, MD, PhD, associate professor of Pediatrics; and Julia Rager, PhD, associate professor of Environmental Sciences and Engineering of UNC, in collaboration with colleagues at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
This research is supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01AI192829.
