Grant: Operating Grant

Pulmonary hypertension is a deadly and relatively common disease that kills patients within three years from the time of diagnosis. While existing therapies improve the quality of life and improves some symptoms, they do not appear to prolong life and they do not reverse the condition. Pulmonary hypertension is caused by excessive growth of cells that eventually occlude the lumen of the blood vessels in the lung, putting strain on the right chambers of the heart which eventually fail, killing the patients. In this work, we proposed that a newly discovered protein that regulates the communication between different organelles within the cell is expressed at much higher levels in the diseased lung arteries compared to the healthy ones, both in humans and animals. We proposed to show that this increase in protein levels (this protein is called "nogo") explains a number of unresolved abnormalities that have been described in this disease. This might open a new window in approaching this mysterious disease. In addition, we aim to show that decreasing or preventing the increase of this protein may be a new therapy for this disease. Because this protein is increased selectively in the lung vessels, sparing the rest of the vessels in the body, such therapies might have less adverse effects and offer better quality of life to the treated patients.