Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is one of the most common genetic diseases in Canada. People with CF often suffer from repeated pulmonary infections and, in most cases, ultimately die from respiratory failure. However, with recent advances in their treatment, the median life expectancy of CF patients has risen to 47 years old and a number of new complications have emerged. One of these complications is CF-related diabetes (CFRD). CFRD is an important co-morbidity of CF because it increases mortality and affects between 20 to 40% of CF adults. We still fail to understand why people with CFRD show increased loss of lung function in the years preceding their diagnosis of CFRD. We have previously demonstrated that adults with CF metabolize glucose differently than healthy peers and have increased glucose excursions even if they are not yet diabetic. An animal model of CF shows that such glucose excess affects the immune system and worsens the clinical course of the disease. Therefore, we hypothesize that increased glucose excursions might affect the immune system which would negatively affect the lung functions of CF patients in the years preceding their diagnosis of CFRD. To test this hypothesis, we will recruit 75 adults with CF either with or without CFRD as well as 25 healthy subjects. We will measure glucose excursions over a three-day period and then the association of these excursions with specific immune cells implicated in lung infections. We will then culture these cells in milieu reproducing these glucose excursions and investigate the impact of high glucose on their ability to protect from infections. We want to determine if glucose excursion could be a new target to improve health of CF adults.