University of Chicago
Location: Chicago, IL, United States
COE since 2024
Website: https://pediatrics.uchicago.edu/sections-programs/sectionaipulmsleep
Description: The University of Chicago Medicine, with a history dating to 1927, is a not-for-profit academic medical health system based on the campus of the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, and with hospitals, outpatient clinics and physician practices throughout Chicago, the south suburbs, and Northwest Indiana. UChicago Medicine unites six organizations to fulfill its tripartite mission of medical education, research, and patient care: Pritzker School of Medicine, the Biological Sciences Division, Community Health and Hospital Division, UChicago Medicine Physicians, AdventHealth and Ingalls Memorial, a community-based hospital and outpatient facility in Harvey, IL. Our research helps primary care and specialists from around the world treat allergic diseases, conditions, and disorders. Although UChicago houses a large, comprehensive allergy program, we focus on three areas of concentration: asthma, food allergy, and drug allergy.
Our program has a long history of engaging in asthma research, management, and advocacy.
Our institution has conducted ground-breaking research from basic science to population science. Dr. Carole Ober is a world-renowned geneticist that has contributed to our understanding of the origins of asthma. Her lab identifies genetic variants that influence gene expression and epigenetic markers in tissues relevant to asthma and allergies. She has used both freshly isolated cells and tissues and cell culture models of gene-environment interactions to dissect the genetic architecture of asthma and allergic diseases. Her studies are conducted in founder populations, the Hutterites of South Dakota and the Amish of Northern Indiana, in U.S. and European birth cohorts, and in patient populations from Chicago. Her and her colleagues found that the microbe-rich dust from Amish homes may help build the immune system in young Amish children to prevent allergic asthma (N Engl J Med 2016;375:411-21). This knowledge will help develop novel strategies to both treat and prevent chronic, non-infectious inflammatory diseases such as asthma.
Her work is focused at the population level as her research portfolio includes work in dissemination and implementation science. She is currently funded to explore the implementability of a walking intervention for Black women with asthma and is co-investigator on a study to examine the efficacy of the DASH diet on asthma outcomes in adults. Dr. Ciaccio’s research aims to identifying the impact of exogenous and endogenous fatty acids on the development and severity of asthma. She is currently funded to explore how omega-3 fatty acid supplementation during pregnancy in African American women influences the development of asthma in their off-spring via a prospective clinical trial. She recently completed an NIH funded project with Dr. White which identified an IL-6 high phenotype of asthma in children.
Within our program is the South Side Pediatric Asthma Center which Dr. Nyenhuis is the clinical director of. This center provides patients with asthma tools to receive evidence-based care, reduce environmental exposures that may be triggering their asthma and to address social needs that are identified. SSPAC patients reported a 72-73% decrease in missed school days and missed workdays and the average number of ED visits decreased by 52% at one year after program participation.
Our program also houses a center dedicated to improving the lives of individuals with food allergy, FACET (The Center for Food Allergy Care, Education, and Translational Research).
FACET was built on the vision of reaching outside allergy and immunology and the University and capitalizing on the diverse knowledge and capabilities across disciplines by engaging and supporting translational FA-related research. To date, FACET collaborations have included partnerships with students at the Booth Business School interested in developing companies related to FA; at the Harris School of Public Policy advocating for supportive laws around epinephrine utilization; at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering developing a postbiotic molecule to treat FA. FACET also supports a comprehensive translational research program from basic science discovery that feeds candidate macromolecules to engineers that feeds candidate drugs to human trials that feeds biospecimens back to the basic laboratory. This cycle has proven effective after the launch and recent pre-IND application of ClostraBio, a company founded to develop novel therapeutics to treat FA. In addition, FACET members from the Committee on Immunology, the Duchossois Family Institute (DFI), and UChicago Medicine are currently collaborating on a clinical trial using a prebiotic as an adjunctive therapy to peanut oral immunotherapy, again demonstrating the ability to exchange information between programs to catalyze discovery. In late 2023, the University of Chicago program became a member of ANACARE (Anaphylaxis Centers of Reference and Excellence), A GA2LEN Network.
Within our program, we have developed a robust drug allergy program, extending its reach across the entire hospital system. Among our extensive offerings, we provide inpatient drug allergy consultations, desensitizations, graded challenge protocols, medication skin testing and state-of-the-art facilities for monitoring outpatient drug challenges. Through strong collaboration with the hospital’s antimicrobial stewardship team, we established inpatient and outpatient penicillin testing and challenge protocols to help de-label penicillin allergies. We were recently awarded an innovation grant for a preoperative beta-lactam allergy screening pilot for elective surgical candidates, in order to improve prophylactic antibiotic selection and in turn, reduce surgical site infections. We plan to extend these efforts to other high-risk patient populations, including transplant and cancer patients. We will soon be designated as one of eight official national sites as part of the United States Drug Allergy Registry (USDAR), through which we will collaboratively advance drug allergy knowledge and research with other leading institutions.