Nicklas Brustad

Project title

Infectious Disease Proneness in Childhood: Characterization towards prevention

What is your project about?

Why do some otherwise healthy children experience many episodes of infectious diseases in childhood while others do not have any? This question remains unanswered, but is very important to understand as early life infection burden increases the risk of developing other diseases later in life. My ambition is to investigate this phenomenon by examining earlyhost- and environmental factors, map disease trajectories and reveal potential protein-, metabolite- and immune markers for infectious diseases in childhood. I will then test my findings in a laboratory setting to understand the biological mechanisms. My Sapere Aude projectis based on two Danish-, one Swedish and one American birth cohort covering more than 2000 children. My collaborators are experts within the field from Harvard University, Karolinska Institute and Imperial College London and my hope is that we will be able to understand the infectious disease patterns in young children aiming towards developing a precision prevention strategy.

How did you become interested in your particular field of research?

During my PhD I investigated early childhood asthma and how we might prevent this by supplementing pregnant women with micronutrients. I observed individual effects of the interventions pointing towards the potential of personalized prevention. Asthma symptoms in young children are often caused by airwayinfetions and since we previously showed that 80% of common infections in early childhood are respiratory infections it seemed obvious to take the next step investigating a range of environmental factors, lung function development and later respiratory infection risk. By utilizing the unique COPSAC set-up with more than 700 women and their children, and the daily diaries with registrations of child infection symptoms, we are able to really understand disease patterns in combination with our mechanistic data layers towards the development of a personalized preventive strategy.

What are the scientific challenges and perspectives in your project?

I believe there are many perspectives. Are we able to specifically identify factors associated with the risk of having many infectious diseases? And maybe these factors are only relevant for some people based on their blood profile? Can we safely communicate to the parents of children having many diseases in early life that this is only for a short period of time – or should they expect these children to continue to have many infections? Can we map specific proteins or metabolites predictive or preventive against infectious diseases? These are only some of the questions I will try to answer in this project. A potential challenge could bet that we will not be able to find any biomarkers, however, promising preliminary findings have already been shown, which will be tested in this project – hopefully together with a whole new range of biomarkers suggested from the findings of this project.

What is your estimate of the impact, which your project may have to society in the long term?

Infectious disease episodes in childhood is something every child will experience. Some more than others. In one of our previous studies, we found that the mean number of infections during the first 3 years of life was 16 episodes. Infection episodes are a burden to the individual child but also the parents involved, and number of episodes have seemed to relate to later risk of developing e.g. asthma, allergy and developmental disorders. If we can understand disease mechanisms and develop a preventive strategy towards these children it would not only benefit the child, but also the parents and the society in general.

Which impact do you expect the Sapere Aude programme will have on your career as a researcher?

To receive a Sapere Aude grant is a huge personal award and recognition of my work as a researcher. It motivates me to keep on continuing towards a better understanding of how we can prevent childhood diseases. I am a trained medical doctor, but started my PhD very early in my career and have continued to do research full time since then, which is almost 8 years ago now. The grant provides me with a belief in my research direction and that me and my colleagues are doing an important job. More specifically, the grant allows me to establish my own research group, purchasing my ideas and develop my international relations.