Determining the genetic and environmental factors associated with metabolic phenotypes across Canada

The Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project (CPTP) is the product of $150+ million dollar investment to create a first class infrastructure to support health research internationally. It is Canada's largest population cohort with detailed data on 300,000+ adults, and a vast collection of biospecimens. The leaders of CPTP have teamed-up with scientists from a range of disciplines from air pollution science to genetics and endocrinology to enable a deeper understanding of how air pollution and the surroundings where people live interact with genes to influence cardiometabolic health. The program capitalizes on existing data and resources to address highly relevant questions for public health authorities, researchers, and health practitioners. The focus is on metabolic syndrome (MetS), a cluster of medical conditions that are common in aging adults, including: obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and insulin resistance. Because people with MetS are more likely to develop diabetes and cardiovascular disease, this disorder represents a substantial burden on healthcare systems. MetS results from the interaction of many genes, lifestyle and the environment, including air pollution, but these mechanisms are not well understood. The activities of this program are: (1) To quantify the effect of air pollution and built environment on MetS; (2) to study the effect of air pollution on molecular changes in DNA that regulate gene activity, and to determine if these changes are associated with MetS; (3) to map differences in the DNA code that regulate the expression of genes, and see if their effect are modified by environmental factors. There are no studies on the genetic and environmental risk factors of MetS at this scale in terms of size, richness of health and genomic data. Neither is there any program that has the infrastructure to return and share data with researchers to facilitate discovery; making this an invaluable return on investment.