Title: AMS Professorship Award for Professor Jody Rosenblatt, King's College London
Funder: The Academy of Medical Sciences

Abstract: I moved my lab from the University of Utah (USA) to Kingâ€™s College London in February and did not hear about the previous call for the AMS professorship or I would have applied. Obtaining an AMS Professorship would help us enormously in the following ways. First, moving my lab to the UK required that I relinquish both my Howard Hughes and NIH RO1 grants that funded most of my lab work. Kingâ€™s College London has generously provided a senior technician and two post-doc positions; however, the start-up funding was minimal. Therefore, I still need funding to cover the running costs for these positions and three other self-funded trainees. Additionally, we need a wide-field microscope for long time-lapse movies, essential to our work, and a Flexivent machine for our asthma project. Therefore, this funding would be invaluable while I become acquainted with the different British funding schemes and await the lengthy process of my current applications. Secondly, most of my previous grants funded the basic mechano-cell biology governing epithelial cell extrusion but did not fund the clinical directions motivated by these findings. The AMS Professorship would help me push some of these findings into clinical/translational pathways that traditional grants do not fund. We would like to develop our recent findings from a mouse asthma model to test if gadolinium, an MRI contrast agent, can block the asthma-associated inflammatory cycle into humans. Our current work suggests that by blocking airway epithelial destruction, gadolinium may also allow airway smooth muscle to regenerate so it does not hyper-constrict. If so, gadolinium (or other inhibitors of extrusion) could actually cure asthma. My current funder for this project thought it would be difficult to get gadolinium repurposed for asthma in the US, due to lack of profit incentives intrinsic to the current medical system. Thus, a significant reason for returning to the UK was the possibility of developing our findings into a treatment for asthma patients in collaboration with the NHS. I have already spoken to a pulmonologist here who is eager to initiate a pilot clinical trial, once we determine the long-term safety of gadolinium inhalation in mice. Finally, an AMS Professorship would help support preliminary studies into how epithelial cell extrusion might impact other diseases. For instance, our findings on asthma suggest that other inflammatory diseases with marked smooth muscle cramping, like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and endometriosis, may result from a similar etiology. Preliminary findings from a recent sabbatical indicate that the mechanical pressures associated with IBS may also cause significant damage to the gut epithelium and inflammation. If so, our work may provide new treatment approaches to these common, yet incurable conditions. In another set of studies, we are finding that senescent epithelial cells do not extrude, suggesting a new model for how they might accumulate as we age. This novel biophysical approach to studying senescence may help explain why we develop more diseases as senescent cells accumulate and replace functional epithelia with age.


Research activity codes: 2.1 BIOLOGICAL AND ENDOGENOUS FACTORS
Health categories: RESPIRATORY