Genetic Susceptibility to Air Pollution Conference

September 4 & 5, 2008

Purpose

As a follow-up meeting from a one-day workshop held in conjunction with the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) 2007 meeting, NIEHS would like to continue a focus on improving research related to genetic susceptibility to respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes from air pollution exposure. A specific need identified at the ISEE workshop was to bring human geneticists and epidemiologists together with investigators who focus on a variety of animal disease models to understand air pollution-induced respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes. Although the human studies and mouse studies are in many ways complementary to each other, there is generally little interaction or collaboration among investigators from both areas of research. For example, genetic studies of mouse models might be informative for identifying Gene-Environment interactions relevant to human diseases and some mouse models may be appropriate for the functional validation of genetic variants identified in human genome-wide association studies.

The purpose of this workshop is to: a) foster collaborations between human disease and mouse model researchers to expedite the identification of genetic susceptibility loci and gene-environment interactions relevant to human diseases associated with air pollution exposure, and b) identify appropriate strategies and approaches for combining research efforts in human population and animal studies to further advance the understanding of the biological pathways involved in human diseases related to air pollution.

Registration

Please fill in our registration form to participate in the conference.