Early Life Immunity in Africa (ELIA) Consortium
Mission Statement
When infants are born, they face a formidable challenge: from a largely sterile womb they emerge into a world teeming with microbes; many of them innocuous, some beneficial and few mortally dangerous. From that moment onwards, their immune systems have to balance disarming pathogens and tolerating commensals for the rest of their lives. When this balance goes awry, disease develops.
It is increasingly appreciated that early life adverse exposures can have long lasting negative consequences on the healthy development of children: pre-term birth, infections, and an imbalance in gut microbiota can all contribute to faltered growth, lower vaccine responses and even deficits in school performance. While this is true everywhere, children growing up in low-income and rural communities are especially at risk.
How environmental exposures mediate these outcomes via the immune system is poorly understood. Systems biology tools offer a unique opportunity to tackle this question by collecting a wide range of immune and microbiota metrics in an unbiased manner. The Early Life Immunity in Africa (ELIA) consortium was founded as a way of harmonizing efforts across independent clinical trials across the continent. Together, we leverage high-dimensional and omics data to better understand infant immune system and microbiota development. Our goal is to delineate how common exposures like adverse birth outcomes, infections and enteric dysfunction impact vaccine responses, physical growth and neurocognitive development. Core to our mission is capacity building for clinical and systems biology research in Africa as well as public involvement and engagement in our work.