Prenatal exposure to a variety of environmental chemicals and contaminants has the potential to manifest as numerous childhood and lifelong diseases and disorders. It is critical to make research of prenatal environmental exposures a priority for disease prevention and more.
With the help of funding from the University Research Corridor, the Michigan Bloodspot Environmental Epidemiology Project, or BLEEP, was formed to develop a greater understanding of prenatal environmental exposures and the large role they have on developmental outcomes and disease.
Through a collaborative effort among the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Michigan State University, as well as the Michigan BioTrust for Health and the Michigan Department of Community Health, researchers are pursuing innovative research projects that will develop advanced techniques for using bloodspots to assess prenatal exposures to toxins and early life epigenetic programming. The team will also create a virtual center that will study conditions of great concern to public health.
The bloodspots will come from the Michigan Neonatal Biobank, which is housed at TechTown on Wayne State University's campus. The biobank maintains research materials from residual neonatal dried blood spots owned by the Department of Community Health. The archive contains approximately four million blood samples collected from Michigan babies born during the past 25 years. The biobank is one of only five within the United States — others are in California, Iowa, New York and Washington — that is part of the newly organized Neonatal Blood Spot Translational Research Network Virtual Repository. Through this project, Michigan is the first to launch a large-scale coordinated effort to utilize the repository's resources for research on the potential impact of prenatal toxicant exposures on disease.
The research team is led by Howard Hu, M.D., NSF international chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences and professor of environmental health, epidemiology and internal medicine at the University of Michigan Schools of Public Health and Medicine; Douglas Ruden, Ph.D., director of epigenomics in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and associate professor at the Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at Wayne State University; and Nigel Paneth, M.D., distinguished professor of epidemiology and pediatrics at Michigan State University. According to the research team, the focus on epigenetics — the molecular structure surrounding DNA, which may likely explain the impact of early-life environmental exposure — is highly innovative.
"Whole genome DNA methylation and hydroxymethylation can also be determined from the NDBS," said Ruden. "These are epigenetic marks that are influenced by environmental contamination. In the near future, it should be possible to analyze these marks and determine the type and dose of neonatal exposures."
Ruden also commented that new analytical technologies should make it possible to determine heavy metal and organic pollution exposure in newborns. "If pockets of exposure are identified in certain areas such as industrial sites, then remediation can be done and pregnant women can be relocated to eliminate the environmental exposure," said Ruden.
The Michgian Alliance for the National Children's Study (MANCS), led by Paneth, will play a major role in BLEEP. The BLEEP project will build on the efforts of the MANCS project by linking the blood spot database to the data collected on families enrolled in MANCS. In particular, the mothers' neonatal DNA can be studied because the repository has samples that go back to 1984.
"The BLEEP project will allow us to benefit from ongoing research studies of children and adults," said Hu. "We will be able to link those studies with data we generate from the blood spots, such as 'signatures' of contaminant exposures and gene expression during pregnancy, which will ultimately help us determine how early-life environmental exposures may contribute toward the risk of diseases such as autism, obesity, asthma, lupus and more."