Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a devastating disease of the lungs and airways, characterized by increasing breathlessness. There is no cure for COPD and current medications for the disease mostly work to relieve symptoms (i.e. help patients breathe, for example, by use of an inhaler, or "puffer"). The cost of COPD hospitalization is 1.5 billion dollars a year in Canada, and the disease is a great burden on patients, caregivers, physicians, hospitals and the Canadian healthcare system. My research aims to discover a new druggable target to modify the disease progression of COPD. It is widely accepted that some people are genetically more likely to get COPD than others. According to several large-scale genetic studies, a gene called DCXR is highly related to lung function. This means that an increase or decrease in the amount of DCXR is related to good or bad (ie. COPD) lung function. In general, a large amount of DCXR is present in human airway cells which are the first line defense against inhaled toxins and DCXR breaks down toxic materials in cigarette smoke and air pollution. Previous studies have shown a protective role of DCXR in airway epithelial injury and the cigarette smoke is by far the most common reason people get COPD. We found that the amount of DCXR was decreased in human airway cells that were short-term exposed to cigarette smoke when compared to the cells that were not through experiment. Although the results are preliminary and needed to include more data as the study is at its early stage, we believe that DCXR is a good target gene for disease modification in COPD.