INITIALISE project
INITIALISE (Inflammation in human early life: targeting impacts on life-course health) is an EU funded project that aims to elucidate how exposures and genome impact gut microbiome, host immune system and metabolism, and how the interplay of these factors impact life-course health. INITIALISE aims to define the role of the maturation of the immune system as a mediator between exposures and life-course health.
About us
We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the immune system development, including the in utero period.
INITIALISE will provide an unprecedented in-depth overview of how the immune systems develops pre- and postnatally, how the specific exogenous and endogenous factors shape it, and how they together contribute to risks of specific adverse health outcomes.
We aim to derive and validate specific and common molecular signatures associated with progression to diverse adverse health outcomes, across immune, metabolic, and neurocognitive domains.
INITIALISE will include multiple health outcomes in the design of longitudinal multiomics studies. This will provide comprehensive overviews of which environmental, genetic and host phenotypic factors are disease-specific, and which are generally associated with poor health outcomes later in life.
We aim to improve life-course health by preventive treatments targeting the developing immune system.
INITIALISE will set up a clinical demonstrator study where infants will be stratified based on their risk profile, then randomised into treatment or placebo. We will establish panels of biomarkers associated with outcomes across the three INITIALISE domains. The specific intervention to be used will be selected towards the end of the second year of the project.
