Researchers will study the genetic factors that influence children’s susceptibility to bacterial infections in a 12 million euro research collaboration - News

By Sam Wong
Friday 9 March 2012

Researchers will study the genetic factors that influence children’s susceptibility to bacterial infections in a 12 million euro research collaboration announced today, led by Imperial College London.

Bacterial infections are responsible for more than a quarter of child deaths globally. Despite the availability of vaccines and antimicrobial drugs, large numbers of children continue to be affected in developed countries as well as the developing world.

As well as looking for genetic differences that affect susceptibility to disease and how severe the illness is, the project aims to understand how the genes identified affect disease processes, using cell biology and functional genomics studies.

“This is a truly interdisciplinary project that will go beyond state-of-the-art genetics to tell us about the biological mechanisms underlying how genetic factors influence disease,” said Professor Mike Levin, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial, who is coordinating the project.

“We hope that the understanding we gain from this research will lead to new tests to predict which children are most at risk of severe disease. We also hope to identify new therapeutic targets which would possibly allow treatments to be matched to individuals based on their predicted immune response.”

The new project, called EUCLIDS, is funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7), and will involve 14 partner institutions in six countries, with a budget of 12 million euros over five years.

It builds on a successful collaboration between Imperial and partners in the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Austria and Singapore to study genetic effects on susceptibility to meningococcal disease. Most people carry meningococcal bacteria in their throat at some point in their life, but most people don’t suffer from disease as a result. Last year the group published the first genome-wide study to identify genetic differences that influence why some people are more vulnerable to meningococcal disease than others.

The new study will draw on data from over 2,000 people with meningococcal disease and over 5,000 healthy controls recruited in the group’s previous research. Further on, the researchers will apply the same approach to other major bacterial infections that affect children, such as pneumococcus, staphylococcus and salmonella. They aim to recruit a further 2,000 people with these infections as well as 2,000 healthy controls in Europe and west Africa. Another arm of the research will investigate how genetic differences affect the body’s response to vaccination in 5,000 participants.

“When you’re looking at the genetic basis of disease, you need to do really large studies in order to get robust findings,” Professor Levin said. “The size of this collaboration enables us to recruit a big cohort so that we can get really powerful results.”

Imperial Consultants, the College’s academic consultancy provider, will lead on EUCLID’s project management and dissemination activities. The research consortium has partnerships with biotechnology companies who are interested in developing new vaccines and diagnostic tools based on the findings of the research.

EUCLIDS partners

• The University of Liverpool, Department of Women’s and Children’s Health
• University of Oxford, Department of Paediatrics
• Academic Medical Centre Amsterdam
• Erasmus MC, Department of Paediatrics
• Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Department of Paediatrics
• Medical University of Graz, Department of Paediatrics
• Servicio Galego de Saude, Hospital Clinico Universitario de Santiago de Compostela
• Biomedical Sciences Institute, Genome Institute of Singapore, Infectious diseases and Human genetics
• Oxford Gene Technology
• Micropathology
• Medical Research Council Laboratories, The Gambia
• Novartis Vaccines and Diagnostics
• Imperial Consultants