Zhaozhong Zhu, ScD

Asthma is a major public health problem that affects seven million children in the U.S. While epidemiological studies have identified risk factors (e.g., severe bronchiolitis) for childhood asthma, the underlying mechanisms of asthma remain poorly understood. This major knowledge gap has hindered efforts to develop targeted strategies for asthma prevention. Recent evidence indicates that the community of both microbes that live in our airway and gut and their produced small molecules called metabolites can affect our immune and metabolic systems and associate with differential risks of asthma. In an ongoing racially/ethnically-diverse cohort of U.S. children, we will comprehensively study this airway and gut microbial community and immune response in children who develop asthma (and its subtypes). This research will not only gain knowledge on how the microbial community interacts with our bodies to shape asthma risk but also offer novel approaches for developing subtype-specific strategies for asthma. The basic mechanisms that we will uncover in this high-risk cohort of infants with bronchiolitis may be relevant to larger populations of children. 

Update:

In the first year our activities have focused on the analysis and publication of the large amount of existing microbiome (the collection of bacteria, viruses and fungi that live on and inside the human body) and gene data from our cohort. With collaboration with Dr. Petrosino lab at Baylor College of Medicine, we are currently conducting microbiome profiling from infants’ stool samples. We anticipate the completion of these processes in the summer of 2024. We have also published our first paper that is related to the ALA award in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, which investigates the airway gene signatures of infants with severe bronchiolitis and their long-term relationship with childhood asthma development.

Funded by the Charles and Amelia Gould Innovation Award