MRC International Nutrition Group Quinquennial Renewal

Malnutrition represents the greatest modifiable threat to global health. This is especially so among children in the world's poorest nations where malnutrition and infections act hand-in-hand leading to high mortality and preventing children from reaching their full potential. Many of the solutions to nutritional deficiencies are already known, and require political will, economic advancement and operational research to achieve a resolution. However, a host of unsolved scientific questions remain and these are critically inhibiting the design and implementation of interventions that could potentially bring immediate health benefits and save millions of lives. The MRC International Nutrition Group's mission is to overcome these barriers through research that illuminates the mechanisms linking diet to disease (see www.ing.mrc.ac.uk). Our vision is to improve the health of nations, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, through research that will translate into medical and public health advances. MRC ING is based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and runs a major permanent fieldstation at MRC Keneba in rural Gambia. In a remarkable partnership between researchers and the local population the MRC has supported internationally pre-eminent research at Keneba for over 65 years leading to numerous seminal advances. Our research falls under 4 themes: The Early Growth and Development theme focuses on mothers and babies and seeks to understand the effects of nutrient deficiencies throughout the lifecourse (from before a baby is conceived through pregnancy, lactation and childhood) on growth, immunity and brain development. It seeks to define critical windows of opportunity when nutritional supplements would be most effective, and to define the optimal nature of such foods. The Iron, Infection and Anemia theme is exploiting the recent discovery of hepcidin - a hormone that acts as the master regulator of iron metabolism - to try to understand how humans and their pathogens (bacteria, viruses and protozoa) compete for this essential nutrient. This battle for iron can lead to serious adverse outcomes if iron is administered to children living in infectious environments. The Calcium, Vitamin D and Bone Health theme seeks to understand how bone health is affected by nutrition and other environmental factors. Populations consuming little dairy produce adapt to living on very low calcium intakes and can show paradoxically harmful effects of calcium supplementation. Understanding how calcium and vitamin D affect bone health and related problems such as osteoporosis is of crucial importance in developed nations and will become so in emerging societies as populations transition towards more Western diets and start to live longer. The Nutritional Genetics theme uses genetic studies to try and pinpoint the key metabolic pathways that link diet with health and disease. The manner in which a person's genes are expressed throughout life can also be influenced by nutrition (so called epigenetics). Understanding these processes have profound implications for human health. They are thought to hold the clues as to how early-life nutrition affects lifelong health. ING is making important contributions to the science of epigenetics. Modern science requires collaborations across numerous technologies and areas of expertise. Based upon the exceptional research opportunities at MRC Keneba, ING is able to attract world-leading scientists to assist us in our discovery mission. Although focussed primarily on the nutritional issues of Sub-Saharan African our research contributes to globally-relevant problems because it focuses on making basic discoveries about how foods and nutrients affect human health.