Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease associated with airway hyperresponsiveness (AHR) and airway tissue remodelling. The prevalence of asthma in Canada has been increasing over the last 20 years and it is estimated that currently 9% of Canadians have asthma. Although medication therapies are designed to minimize the airway inflammation component of asthma, patients with the most severe phenotype poorly respond to treatment. Life quality could be greatly improved and costs of treatment significantly decreased if disease is better controlled. Although it has been established that increasing airway smooth muscle (ASM) mass represents a major component responsible for AHR and airway narrowing in asthma, the regulatory mechanism(s) involved in this process is (are) poorly understood. In particular, the contractile and proliferative properties of the ASM cells are of central importance to the induction of AHR in asthma. At present it is poorly understood whether the proliferative and contractile phenotypes of ASM cells are mutually exclusive phenotypes as previously proposed (Halayko AJ et al. 1996) or linked events that occur simultaneously in the same cell. Thought this study, the understanding of the contractile and proliferative properties will be important in elucidating the dynamics of phenotypic and functional switching in ASM cells in airway diseases and in developing new therapies.