Reduce, Rebalance, and Replenish: Investigating the infant microbiota to minimize antibiotics-associated asthma risk

Presenters: Darlene Dai, MSc: I have an MSc in Statistics from UBC and 7-years of work experience as a biostatistician in discovering genomic biomarkers of cancer, heart, and lung disease in academia and industry. I am currently pursuing my PhD degree in Experimental Medicine at UBC under the co-supervision of Drs. Stuart Turvey and Raymond Ng. My research focuses on exploring and understanding the associations across infant gut microbiome, environmental factors and pediatric asthma. By using the CHILD Cohort Study, my PhD project aims to develop a precision health approach empowered by “omics” to predict, and ultimately prevent early-onset asthma. Please reach out if you would like to learn more about me and my research! Charisse Petersen, PhD: I earned a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from The University of Utah in 2017 interrogating immune-microbiota interactions within the mammalian gut. I continued this work as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Brett Finlay’s lab at UBC with a specific focus on early-life microbiota maturation and immune development. I joined Dr. Stuart Turvey’s lab in 2020, and I have to say that the best part of my job is working with studies like the CHILD study to shine a light on all the wonderful things that our microbiota does to support infant development. The more that we know, the better we can be at protecting these important bacteria in order to keep infants and children healthy. Summary: Early antibiotic exposure is linked to persistent disruption of the infant gut microbiome and subsequent elevated pediatric asthma risk. Breastfeeding acts as a primary modulator of the gut microbiome during early life, however, its impact on asthma development has remained unclear. We harnessed the CHILD cohort to interrogate the influence of breastfeeding on antibiotic-associated asthma risk (n=2,521) and coupled this with metagenomic profiling of the infant gut microbiome in a subset of participants (n=1,338). Children who took antibiotics without breastfeeding had 3-fold higher asthma odds, while there was no such association in children who received antibiotics while breastfeeding. This benefit was associated with widespread ‘re-balancing’ of taxonomic and functional components of the infant microbiome. Functional changes associated with asthma protection were linked to enriched Bifidobacterium longum subspecies infantis colonization. Subsequent interrogation of human milk oligosaccharide (HMO) composition from paired maternal human milk samples for 561 of these infants revealed a selection of HMOs that were positively associated with both B. infantis and these broader functional changes. Our data suggest that breastfeeding and antibiotics exert opposing effects on the infant microbiome and that breastfeeding enrichment of B. infantis may mitigate antibiotic-associated asthma risk.

Mediasite Presenter

5/16/2023 7:00:00 PM