Grant: Project Grant

Asthma is not just a Canadian health issue but a serious world-wide public health problem, with an estimated 235 million people suffering with asthma. To date clinical trials have established that treatment with bronchodilators and inhaled steroids can relieve patient symptoms but these treatments are unable to reverse the disease process. Asthma patients have difficulty breathing as their airways - the tubes that carry air in and out of the lung - become partially scared. This is caused by the structural cells that line the airway tubes which respond to allergen exposure by promoting inflammation and thickening of the airways, termed fibrosis. The goal of our study is to identify the disease drivers that cause airway fibrosis in asthma patients and to identify new therapies to prevent the disease. Our work leverages a unique set of donated human lungs which will be analyzed with new computed tomography (CT) scanning methods to understand how the physical damage and airway fibrosis occurs throughout the asthmatic lung. We will then use lung cells isolated from the patients with asthma to test if the disease-drivers we identify can be modulated with new or existing therapies. This research will allow better understanding of airway fibrosis in asthma, and should lead to improved measures to help Canadians with asthma experience less disease symptoms.