About
The Milieu Intérieur Consortium has established a 1000-person healthy population-based
study (stratified according to sex and age), creating an unparalleled opportunity for assessing the
determinants of human immunologic variance.
The Milieu Intérieur Consortium initiated in September 2012 a cross-sectional healthy population-based study called “Genetic & Environmental Determinants of Immune Phenotype Variance: Establishing a Path Towards Personalized Medicine (ID-RCB Number: 2012-A00238-35)”. The overall aim of the Milieu Intérieur study is to assess the factors underlying immunological variance within the general healthy population.
The primary objective is to define genetic and environmental factors that contribute to the observed heterogeneity in immune responses. This will be realized by characterizing and integrating (i) every-day life habits through an extensive questionnaire; (ii) genomic variability using genome-wide SNP genotyping and whole-exome sequencing; (iii) metagenomic diversity based on sequence analysis of bacterial, fungal and viral populations in fecal and nasal samples; (iv) induced transcriptional and protein
signatures by wholemicrobes, microbial-associatedmolecular pattern (MAMP) agonists, medically relevant cytokines, or
stimulators of the T cell response; and (v) variability in levels of circulating immune cell populations based on flow
cytometry.
The secondary objective is to establish a cell bank, including EBV-transformed B cell lines and fibroblasts from genetically annotated healthy individuals for use in mechanistic studies. To achieve the above-mentioned objectives, a total of 1000 healthy volunteers, descendants of mainland French persons for at least three generations, split equally by sex (1:1 sex ratio) and stratified across five-decades of life were recruited.
