Next Gen Therapies for Preterm Infants: Can the Microbiome and the Immune System Reveal Novel Treatment Strategies?

Project description

Direct clinical relevance: high

Hands-on learning opportunities: Various aspects of work with mice and or human specimens, workup of tissues for various downstream applications, flow cytometry, histology, immunohistochemistry, protein detection by ELISA.

Established collaboration with the Monash Health department of Pediatric Surgery to collect human specimen including blood, intestinal and stool samples. The severe chronic lung disease bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) causes considerable suffering for premature infants and their families and contributes substantially to health care costs. Necrotising enterocolitis (NEC) is a disease of the premature gut that is poorly understood and carries a high mortality. No effective therapy is known for either devastating disease. In view of the importance of inflammation for BPD and NEC, we will assess how effectively innovative anti-inflammatory treatments protect against BPD and NEC. In newborn mice with a BPD-like lung disease, we will quantify if treatments protect against the development of lung pathology as reflected in biochemical and cellular markers of inflammation and loss of alveolarisation and vascularisation on day 3 and 28 of life.

In human specimen (plasma, stool, tissue) we will assess the underlying mechanism of Necrotizing Enterocolitis a devastating intestinal disease of preterm infants.