Infection and immunity from a life course perspective: Life Study enhancement pilot study (360G-Wellcome-101169_Z_13_Z)

We aim to understand how interactions between microorganisms, both pathogenic and the colonising microbiota, the immune system and clinical, social and behavioural factors during pregnancy, birth, infancy and childhood influence health throughout life. We therefore propose an Infection and Immunity Enhancement to Life Study, a large national birth cohort study that aims to recruit 90,000 participants. This will enable collection of additional biological samples, from mothers and their babies at birth and from babies in their first year, to investigate causal pathways underlying adverse health outcomes over four interacting domains; the microbiota, acquisition of pathogens, host and microbial genomics and epigenetics, and the immune system. The main Enhancement will also create an internationally unique archive of paired biological samples from mothers and babies, generating an invaluable scientific resource. Overall, this empirical research will be widely informative across a range of clinical, public health and policy fields. This proposal seeks funding for a pilot phase to the Enhancement to develop and test the methodology and project infrastructure, and assess acceptability. The pilot will also enable archiving of 4,750 mother-baby paired samples and deliver hypothesis-driven scientific outputs using a subset of individuals with common perinatal exposures, such as antibiotics in pregnancy.