Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Exercise has been known to have significant effects on several aspects of human physiology. Recently, several major news outlets like the New York Times have been reporting on the effects of exercise on improving brain function, reducing cancer risk, and altering immune function and how that impacts the susceptibility to flu infections. Indeed, studies have shown that various exercise activities can affect our ability to fight infections, particularly upper respiratory tract infections (URTI). This happens because moderate exercise can boost our immune system and thereby protects us from bacterial and viral infections, whereas prolonged and intensive exercise has the opposite effect. This, in turn, has important implications on the incidence of URTI and on the ability of athletes to train and compete at the highest levels. How and why exercise modulates the immune response remains unclear. This proposal aims at answering these two questions. Specifically, our research has three objectives: 1) understand the underlying mechanism through which various exercise activities change our immune response; 2) identify novel biomarkers of effective training, where we determine which physical activity patterns causes an enrichment in genes that are known to enhance immune function; 3) determine how exercise alters the metabolic status of immune cells. The current knowledge regarding the effects of exercise on the immune response and the subsequent effect on URTI susceptibility is largely descriptive and in many cases anecdotal. Our studies will lead to an important advancement in the field of exercise immunology, and can be used to suggest strategies for modifying training and recovery activities to not only reduce the incidence of training-related URTI, but also optimize immune function and improve the wellbeing of athletes and physically active individuals.