HEDIMED
/HEDIMED: Human Exposomic Determinants of Immune Mediated Diseases
The occurrence of many immune-mediated disease has increased over the past decades, but little is known about environmental factors influencing the risk.
The HEDIMED project aims to find out how environmental factors may contribute to the risk of major immune-mediated diseases: type 1 diabetes, celiac disease, asthma and allergies.
HEDIMED is a multidisciplinary project that will be carried out by a consortium of 22 partner institutions, led by Professor Heikki Hyöty at the University of Tampere, Finland. Each partner consist of many investigators and collaborators, and Lars C. Stene at Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) is the contact person for the Norwegian site in HEDIMED.
HEDIMED COHORTS
The research will be based on pregnancy or birth cohort studies in Nordic- and other countries in Europe (figure), including two cohorts from Norway, run by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH): MoBa (https://www.fhi.no/en/studies/moba/) and MIDIA (https://www.fhi.no/en/studies/midia/).
The exposome, in brief, refers to the sum of all factors individuals are exposed to throughout life, starting in the womb. HEDIMED will use state of the art technology to measure environmental chemicals, infections, lifestyle, air pollution, diet, immune function and microbiota and to study how these relate to risk of the aforementioned diseases. Several unique cohorts with repeated biological samples collected from early life will provide a highly informative data set.
HEDIMED is one of nine projects funded under a EU Horizon 2020 call named “the exposome project”, which have formed the Human Exposome network: https://www.humanexposome.eu/. NIPH is a partner in three of the network projects, HEDIMED, ATHLETE and EXIMIOUS.
The HEDIMED project period is 2020-2024, and the picture below shows some of the HEDIMED consortium members, assembled at the kick off meeting in Tampere, Finland, Feb 12-14, 2020.
Follow the progress in HEDIMED at the project website https://www.hedimed.eu/
and twitter: https://twitter.com/HEDIMED2020 , @HEDIMED2020
