Research report: U-M-led consortium to receive up to $52 million in NIH funding to study why viral respiratory infections affect children differently

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has approved funding for the first year of the project, which is intended to examine why some children recover fully while others develop severe illness, recurrent respiratory problems or persistent lung disease. Researchers plan to enroll 1,500 children ages 0 to 24 months and follow them through at least ages four to five. The project, called Systematic Phenotyping and Endotyping in Viral Infections in the Young Lung, or SPIN VINYL, will include children hospitalized with bronchiolitis, pneumonia and pediatric acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Michigan Medicine will serve as the clinical coordinating center, and the University of Utah will serve as the Data and Analysis Coordinating Center. Ten hospitals will enroll participants: Michigan Medicine, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital Colorado, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, Texas Children’s Hospital, Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Children’s National Medical Center. Principal investigator Peter Mourani, a professor and associate chair of research in the Department of Pediatrics and division director of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at Michigan Medicine and U-M Health C.S.

Mott Children’s Hospital, said clinicians currently have limited ability to predict a young child’s course after hospitalization for a viral respiratory infection. Some children may recover completely, others may have repeated problems during subsequent infections, and still others may develop persistent respiratory disease. The longitudinal study is designed to characterize these different trajectories and investigate when and how interventions might eventually be possible.

Investigators will combine detailed clinical assessments with pulmonary function testing, medical imaging, measurements of environmental exposures, activity and sleep monitoring and advanced molecular analyses. The biological component is intended to characterize interactions among a child’s immune system, the infecting pathogen and the airway microbiome. Researchers will also examine characteristics of the infecting virus, a child’s underlying biological susceptibility and environmental factors such as air pollution and tobacco smoke.

By studying these elements together, the consortium aims to identify patterns associated with resilience and recovery or with vulnerability to ongoing respiratory problems. Early-life viral respiratory illness is a major cause of hospitalization in infants and toddlers, and early respiratory illness has been associated in earlier research with later respiratory morbidity, including recurrent wheezing and asthma. The source release notes that the biological reasons for sharply different responses to similar infections remain poorly understood.

SPIN VINYL is designed to address that gap by following children from the acute hospitalization into later childhood, assessing immediate recovery and severe illness alongside the return to healthy lung function, repeated respiratory problems and persistent respiratory disease. The consortium will use advanced statistical, informatics, machine-learning and artificial-intelligence methods to search for patterns in the integrated clinical, physiological, environmental and molecular information. One objective is to identify measurable biological signatures associated with poor outcomes, including among children born preterm or those with congenital heart disease.

Researchers hope such signatures could eventually help clinicians recognize children at greater risk. Recruitment across 10 hospitals is intended to make the study’s population nationally diverse in geographic, environmental, socioeconomic and demographic circumstances. The consortium describes this broad reach as a way to understand respiratory illness across varied settings.

The long observation period is intended to connect the severity and biological features of an early infection with respiratory health assessed years later. Other lead investigators include Chaz Langelier, professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of California San Francisco, and Tamara Perry, professor of pediatrics in the Division of Allergy and Immunology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and president of Arkansas Children’s Research Institute. Mary Dahmer, associate professor of pediatrics in the Division of Critical Care, and Victoria Blanc, director of the Central Biorepository at Michigan Medicine, will lead the consortium’s biorepository, which will be housed at the University of Michigan.

Carey Lumeng, professor of pediatrics and molecular and integrative physiology and division director of Pulmonary Medicine at Michigan Medicine, will lead the pulmonary-function core. The University of Utah’s Data and Analysis Coordinating Center will be led by Kevin Watt, professor of pediatrics, chair in Clinical Pharmacology and chief of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology in the Department of Pediatrics; Larry Cook, professor of pediatrics in the Division of Critical Care at the University of Utah; and Tellen Bennett, professor and vice chair of Clinical Informatics in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Campus. For Michigan Medicine, the award represents an institutional investment in a nationally coordinated pediatric respiratory research effort.

The funding does not report a clinical result or demonstrate that the proposed biomarkers, predictive methods or interventions can already improve children’s recovery. Instead, it supports longitudinal characterization of a population for whom outcomes after viral lower respiratory tract infection are uncertain. By following 1,500 hospitalized children and integrating clinical data, lung physiology, environmental exposures and biological characteristics, the investigators aim to clarify the factors associated with divergent recovery and long-term respiratory health.

Subject of Research: A longitudinal multicenter observational study of recovery and lung health after viral lower respiratory tract infections in children under two years old.

Article Title: U-M-led consortium to receive up to $52 million in NIH funding to study why viral respiratory infections affect children differently

Article References: U-M-led consortium to receive up to $52 million in NIH funding to study why viral respiratory infections affect children differently. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

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Keywords: viral respiratory infections, children, bronchiolitis, pediatric pneumonia, lung health, immune response, airway microbiome, environmental exposures, longitudinal study, NIH funding, U-M-led, consortium