Grant: Operating Grant

The frequency and severity of asthma have increased in industrialized nations for the last couple of decades, despite the opposite trend for many other chronic diseases. It is estimated that more than 10% of the population are asthmatic, with a greater proportion in children. According to the Asthma Society of Canada, 500 Canadians die every year from asthma and 3 million Canadians are suffering from the disease. The economic burden on our health care system is enormous. There is no cure for asthma and the cause has not been identified. One of the few consensuses among asthma researchers is that excessive contraction of airway smooth muscle, the muscle layer that surrounds the airways and can constrict the airways when stimulated, is an important mechanism. Many drugs for asthma therapy attempt to relax the muscle. Although the treatment alleviates the symptoms, hypersensitivity of the airways to inhaled irritants remains. To find a cure for asthma, we need to understand why the airway muscle contracts excessively to cause difficulty in breathing. In the proposed research we will systematically compare the mechanical and biochemical properties, as well as the subcellular organization of the protein structures of airway smooth muscle in human asthmatic and non-asthmatic control subjects. This has not been done before because of the difficulty in obtaining suitable lung tissues. We have established a unique source of human tissues, the International Institute for the Advancement of Medicine (http://www.iiam.org/) through which human tissue obtained at autopsy is donated for research purposes. Findings from this project will help identify defects in asthmatic airway muscle and aid the design of a new generation of drugs that can better alleviate or eliminate asthma symptoms.