By Ava Dzurenda
Photography by Rayni Shiring, University of Pittsburgh
How do early-life environmental exposures influence health later in life?
Alison Sanders, associate professor, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, and associate dean for research, School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, and Izzuddin M. Aris, associate professor, Department of Population Medicine, and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute researcher, Harvard Medical School, have received a nearly $3.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how such exposures may influence kidney health and blood pressure.
The Multiple Principal Investigators (MPI) R01 grant, titled “Neighborhood and Individual Environmental Risk Factors in Early Life and -Omics Biomarkers for Kidney Function Trajectories Across Childhood and Adulthood,” will fund the research through April 2030.
Nested in Project Viva, a long-running pre-birth cohort based in eastern Massachusetts, researchers will examine how exposures during pregnancy and childhood—including air pollution, metals and neighborhood-level environmental factors—may contribute to kidney dysfunction and hypertension later in life.
“We are interested in understanding how early-life exposures, whether that is neighborhood context or specific individual-level exposures to nephrotoxicants like air pollution or metals, lead to later-life kidney dysfunction or higher blood pressure,” Sanders said.
A key component of the study is its focus on environmental mixtures rather than isolated toxicants. Instead of studying a single contaminant, such as lead alone, the team will investigate the cumulative effects of low-level daily exposure to contaminants like air pollution, lead and cadmium. The study will take a longitudinal approach, where the team will incorporate exposures from prenatal, childhood and adolescence with kidney and blood pressure changes from childhood and adolescence to young adulthood.
The research also aims to identify novel urinary biomarkers that are sensitive and specific enough to detect kidney damage earlier than traditional clinical indicators.
“We know that early life exposures predict kidney disease in adulthood, but it can take decades for clinical disease to arise and be diagnosed,” said Sanders. “We are filling the gap by investigating this in a long-running longitudinal cohort, tying early life exposures to biomarkers observed over time through childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.”
This work builds on Sanders’ previous research funded through an NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award and an NIH Virtual Consortium for Translational/Transdisciplinary Environmental Research R01 award, which focused specifically on metals exposure and prenatal exposures. The new R01 expands that work to include air pollution and neighborhood-level environmental factors.
Sanders said the findings could have implications for environmental health research in Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh region.
“A long-term goal of my research is to apply these life-course longitudinal models to better understand the effects of the environment in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania more broadly,” Sanders said.
Sanders also leads the Rust to Resilience Environmental Chemical Research Center at Pitt Public Health, which collaborates with researchers across Pennsylvania, including partners at Geisinger and Carnegie Mellon University, to study metal and PFAS exposures in communities across the state.
The grant represents a continued research partnership between Pitt and Harvard-affiliated investigators.
“We’ve collaborated in the past, and this grant allows us to continue that work together,” Sanders said.
Key collaborators on the project include coinvestigators Diane Gold, professor of environmental health, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health; Emily Oken, professor of population medicine, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute researcher and principal investigator of Project Viva; Andres Cardenas, assistant professor of epidemiology, Stanford University; Mingyu Zhang, assistant professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center epidemiologist; Jacqueline Ho, associate professor of pediatrics in Pitt's School of Medicine; and Peng Gao, assistant professor of environmental Health, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.