Hans Bisgaard

The mission of my research has been to understand the origins of asthma, eczema and allergy and to translate this into clinical practice to improve disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Clinical translational research in the very early life has been pivotal in this endeavor. Twenty years ago, I founded the Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood (COPSAC) mother-child cohorts, recruiting a total of 1100 pregnant women. Their children are being followed closely at the research clinic according to strict guidelines and with extensive objective assessments. These unique extensive clinical data and the comprehensive biobank are combined with cutting-edge interdisciplinary basic research, including genome wide scanning, sequencing of the microbiome in multiple human compartments, and longitudinal metabolomics to develop a differentiated characterization of the disease processes. This concept has proven successful as reflected in important discoveries on the role of the human microbiome for the origins of asthma and allergy and the discovery of novel genes and gene-environment interactions. Recently COPSAC demonstrated that supplementation with fish oil and vitamin D during pregnancy markedly reduce the risk of developing asthma in the child. The resonance of our results is illustrated by an increasing number of publications in the highest-ranking international papers as well as patent applications.