New targets for chronic lung disease
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Investigation of aberrant cell signalling mechanisms in chronic lung disease
IRAS ID
216240
Contact name
Louise E Donnelly
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Imperial College London
Duration of Study in the UK
4 years, 11 months, 31 days
Research summary
Chronic lung diseases affect millions of people world-wide. These include chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD for short, severe asthma and lung fibrosis. COPD is a debilitating lung condition where patients find breathing very difficult. COPD will be the 3rd biggest cause of death globally by 2020 and is thought to be caused mainly by cigarette smoking.
Although, most people with asthma can be treated with our current medicines, these are not very effective for about 5% of patients and this is called ‘severe asthma’. Both COPD and severe asthma are chronic inflammatory lung diseases which means that the lungs of these patients contain increased numbers of inflammatory cells or white cells. A similar inflammatory response may also occur in lung fibrosis. Although these diseases have different causes, they all have chronic inflammation. We think that this inflammation may be responsible for the changes we see in the lungs of these patients. To date, there are no medicines that can stop this inflammation or reverse the damage to the lungs of any of these patients. However, we know that the types of cells that are recruited to the lungs are different in each of these diseases, therefore we will investigate the cells from these patients to see why they behave differently with the aim of finding new treatments. We initially want to focus on the white cell that is important in keeping the lung clean – these cells are called macrophages. We know in COPD there are more of these cells, but they do not behave normally as they are less able to eat bacteria or dying cells and keep the lungs clean. We have also shown this happens in severe asthma too, but we need to find out why and whether this happens in other lung diseases too.
REC name
London - Stanmore Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/LO/0571
Date of REC Opinion
17 May 2018
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion