Grant: Project Grant - Priority Announcement: Health and Climate Change

Accumulating evidence demonstrates that breathing air pollutants leads to devastating increases in sickness and death worldwide over time. However, there is little data comparing the effects of different types of air pollution on health. In Canada, traffic-related air pollution and wood smoke (wildfires and wood burning for heating) are very common air pollutants. We will safely complete a controlled human exposure study to test how these air pollution types acutely affect health. Healthy adult volunteers will breathe filtered air (control), wood smoke (WS), diesel exhaust (DE), and WS plus DE each for 2 hours, with 4 weeks between each exposure (washout). Before and after each exposure, volunteers will answer questions, perform nose and lung testing, and give blood samples. At 24 hours after each exposure, volunteers will undergo a bronchoscopy to collect samples from their lungs. We will investigate the effects of each exposure, relative to the filtered air control, on airway function, symptoms, gene and protein expression, and cell populations in the lungs, nose, and blood. We will also determine whether these measures are affected by biological sex or genetics. We suspect that exposure to DE and WS will lead to different biological changes in these healthy volunteers. We predict that the response to each exposure will be altered by participant's biological sex and genetics. By testing how exposures to these types of air pollution affect lung and systemic health, we will learn about which are most harmful and start to discover responses in the body that can be targeted to reduce harm following these common exposures. Our research has the potential to help millions of Canadians exposed to WS and DE, while pertaining to the billions around the world increasingly exposed to wildfire smoke or using wood for cooking or heating.