Please join us to hear Professor Valerie Verhasselt discuss her work on the role of early nutrition in the development of the immune system, with a specific focus on allergy prevention/ helminth infection prevention/ ontogeny of gut immune cells.
Professor Verhasselt is the Director of the Centre of Research for Immunology and Breastfeeding at UWA and Telethon Kids Institute (TKI). Valerie Verhasselt trained at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Belgium) where she obtained the diploma of Medical Doctor, Specialist in Internal Medicine and a PhD in Immunology. She has 20 years of experience in translational research on the impacts of breastfeeding on a child’s immune development and health. With her team, she aims to establish the matches and, importantly, the possible mismatches, between what the infant needs for healthy development and the nutrition that they are provided.
She has revolutionized the field of allergy prevention through early oral allergen exposure with a landmark study published in Nature Medicine in 2008. This study contributed to the recent major changes in feeding guidelines for food allergy prevention, co-authored by Prof. Verhasselt (European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology food allergy prevention guidelines 2021). Along with collaborators in Uganda, she is exploring a potential game changer in the field of vaccination – research providing evidence that breastfeeding may be a natural, and very efficient, way to vaccinate children and protect them from infectious diseases, including Malaria, the most severe public health problem worldwide. Professor Verhasselt’s team is also investigating the importance of colostrum for growth, allergy and infection prevention. This knowledge will inform changes in clinical practice and drive policy changes, such as increased budgets for community and health services for early breastfeeding support.