SRP Diabetes Postdoc Fellowships - Project 1

Project title: Early life imprinting and modulation of the risk of developing type 1 diabetes.

Prinicipal Investigator: Petter Brodin

Department of Women's and Children's Health

Research Project

Early life imprinting and modulation of the risk of developing type 1 diabetes.

Many immune mediated diseases including type-I diabetes are linked to perturbed immune system development or skewed immune-microbiome relationships early in life. Most information on immune development to date stems from mouse models or cord blood, but neither of these can account for environmental exposures in human newborns. Our group has performed a first longitudinal study of immune development in human newborns using modern systems immunology methods and revealed immune-microbe differences with possible relevance to diseases such as type I diabetes. Microbial composition is influenced by mode of delivery, feeding and antibiotic exposure and the microbiome evolves through an ordered sequence of events. Abundant beneficial microbes like Bifidobacterial species protect against allergies and type I diabetes in association studies, but mechanisms remain elusive. We have reported that metabolites such as Indole-3 Lactic acid, produced by bifidobacterial metabolizing human milk oligosaccharides, skew T-cell populations away from diseases associated states and induce immune tolerance by upregulating inhibitory factors such as Galectin 1 early in life (Henrick et al, Cell, 2021). This example of a probiotic-mediated immunomodulation study opens several interesting hypotheses for future mechanistic study and this is the focus of our SRP fellowship project.

Project description

Read the complete project description.

How to apply

Link to job posting at VARBI application portal.

The closing date for applications is midnight CEST on Saturday 30^th April, 2022.