Lars Engstrand

Our gut microbiome is affected by many factors, including drug use. The first years of life are crucial to establish a healthy, stable gut microbiome, yet infancy is also when most antibiotics are used and many receive gastric acid inhibition. As these drugs are known to disrupt the adult microbiome, the effects in infants could be worse. We will assess how these drugs affect the microbiome and health during early life. First  we will assess the gut microbiome of 3000 babies, born into our large Swedish longitudinal pregnancy microbiome cohort. Second, 400 infants operated during their first days/months of life will be enrolled, of which part receive routine gastric acid inhibition for at least one year. Through repeated stool microbiome collection, questionnaires and registry linkages, we can assess how their microbiome and health are affected and restored. The third and fourth projects are based on the high quality nationwide Swedish registries, to assess how maternal/early life drug use affects the risk of neonatal complications and infections.  In the fifth project, we will assess global antibiotics and gastric acid inhibitors utilisation during infancy (meta-analysis).  With these projects, we want to contribute to the understanding of drug-microbiome interactions in young children, and understand the long-term health consequences. These projects can have direct clinical implications, by contributing to better prescription practices and reducing inappropriate intake.

KI transformed its activities in many ways as a response to the pandemic. In just four weeks, the Centre for Translational Microbiome Research converted from a research lab to a diagnostic lab to assist with PCR tests on the national level. In 2020 alone this lab analysed over half a million diagnostic COVID-19 tests and during the pandemic > 135 000 WGS of SARS Cov-2 have been delivered to Public health Agency (approx 70% of all sequenced strains in Sweden during the pandemic). A collaborative network and the flexible cooperation with the health care sector and hospitals in Sweden is the goal for the National Pandemic Center at Karolinska Institutet.