Genelle Lunken

PhD, RD, BSc

Investigator, BC Children's Hospital
Registered Dietitian, IBD Centre of BC

Canada has amongst the highest rates of immune-mediated diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, in the world. The vast majority of these diseases have no known cure. Therefore, new therapeutic strategies that improve clinical outcomes in these patient groups are urgently needed. Additionally, there are large differences between patients in response to various medical and dietary therapies, which challenges a ‘one-size-fits all’ approach to clinical care.



My research focuses on expanding our knowledge of host-immune-microbe interactions, with a specific focus on identifying host (i.e., diet) and microbial factors involved in different responses to medical and dietary therapies. By better understanding individualized response to treatments, we can move towards developing and using personalized therapeutic programs to improve patient outcomes.

We use various digital health technologies and ‘multi-omics’ techniques (i.e., metagenomics, metabolomics, metaproteomics) to explore the role that dietary intakes and the microbes residing in the gastrointestinal tract play in changing the response to therapy.