Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

COPD is a complex, heterogeneous disease that is characterized by shortness of breath and persistent cough and phlegm production. COPD is caused by an interaction between genetic and environmental (most commonly cigarette smoke in the Western world) factors, and is the 2nd leading cause of death in North America. Very few new classes of medications have been developed in the last two decades to treat COPD, mostly due to the incomplete understanding of what causes the disease, its heterogeneity, and the lack of biological markers for detecting the onset or characterizing the stage of COPD. New treatments will most likely come from a better understanding of the basic patho-biological pathways that drive the disease. With advancements in human genetics, and -omics technology, there is an unprecedented opportunity to discover new therapeutic targets for COPD. Our group is using a novel unbiased integrative genetic-genomic approach to discover new pathways in COPD. Through this process, we have identified several proteins that may serve as promising drug targets for COPD. My research will translate genetic information to tangible drug targets in lung tissue of patients with COPD. The most promising targets will be examined using a human cell culture model to determine the exact functions of these targets using various drug inhibitors. In this proposal, we will determine which of these genetic "hits" are "druggable" targets for new therapeutic products in COPD. Data arising from our multi-disciplinary approach will provide valuable information to accelerate the drug discovery and delivery process for patients with COPD in Canada and worldwide.