{"id":50821,"date":"2018-03-27T09:56:03","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T16:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=50821"},"modified":"2018-03-28T15:17:18","modified_gmt":"2018-03-28T22:17:18","slug":"emily-cope-respiratory-diseases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/emily-cope-respiratory-diseases\/","title":{"rendered":"From basic to translational research: NAU scientist uses microbial sequencing to understand and treat respiratory diseases"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kerry Bennett<\/strong>
\nOffice of the Vice President for Research<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 16 percent of adults in the United States have been diagnosed with chronic rhinosinusitis, or CRS\u2014commonly defined as a sinus infection and inflammation that lasts more than 12 weeks. Not only do CRS patients report a significantly worse quality of life than those with asthma, congestive heart failure and chronic back pain, but the disease results in $65 billion per year in health care costs. Yet, despite the substantial socioeconomic impact of sinonasal inflammation, its underlying cause is not well understood.<\/p>\n

Emily Cope<\/strong>, an assistant professor of microbiology and assistant director of the Pathogen and Microbiome Institute<\/a> at Northern Arizona University, is out to change that with her research.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goals of my lab are to first understand the biology of the airway and the microbiome in the context of human health and disease\u00a0and then to use that knowledge to develop new therapeutics, such as microbial therapies\u2014prebiotics or probiotics\u2014to help treat CRS and asthma,\u201d Cope said.<\/p>\n

Cope is inspired to help people with CRS because it is a painful condition; she also wants to try to reduce the cost of treatment, since current treatments can be prohibitively expensive for lower-income populations. She stressed that a safe, effective microbial therapy, such as a probiotic, will need to undergo years of research, development and clinical trials before it can be widely distributed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to understand exactly which microbes are present in each case so we can understand exactly which microbes we need to replace in that system,\u201d Cope said. \u201cYou have to be careful not to introduce the wrong microbes into the system, which could antagonize the microbes already there and worsen infection or inflammation. You have to approach this with caution and with hard scientific evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cope invited to contribute to journal focused on early-career scientists<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Cope was recently invited by the American Society for Microbiology to contribute a paper for a special issue of mSystems<\/em><\/a> focused on early-career scientists and their perspectives on the future of the field of host-microbe biology.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis special issue should be considered a guidebook to some of the best and brightest early-career minds currently at work in microbial systems biology,\u201d mSystems<\/em> editor Jack A. Gilbert said. \u201cWe wanted to provide a forum to highlight what some of the incredible innovators in our community are doing and where those who embody the future of our field see their science progressing over the coming years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an honor to be included in this Perspectives issue,\u201d Cope said. \u201cIt gave me an opportunity to reflect on the work we\u2019ve done over the last 18 months as well as where we see our research going over the next five to 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cope\u2019s paper, \u201cHost-Microbe Interactions in Airway Disease: toward Disease Mechanisms and Novel Therapeutic Strategies,\u201d discusses some of the projects she\u2019s working on and their impact on scientists\u2019 understanding of the microbiome.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re interested in how altered microbiota composition or function influences airway inflammatory diseases, chiefly CRS as well as asthma and cystic fibrosis,\u201d Cope said. \u201cTo study CRS, we use sequencing technologies to identify which microbes are in both healthy and diseased airways and then use experimental approaches to determine what these microbes are doing. That\u2019s what\u2019s lacking in the field right now. We know that different microbes may be present in healthy airways in different numbers \u00a0than in diseased airways, but we don\u2019t know how these altered communities contribute to inflammation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cope inspired by mentors at NAU and UCSF<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The work Cope does is highly collaborative. She works with TGen North, collaborates with clinical partners Dr. Devyani Lal and Dr. Matthew Rank at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale and with Dr. Andrew Goldberg and Dr. Steve Pletcher at the University of California San Francisco\u2019s (UCSF) Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.<\/p>\n

Cope earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in cellular and molecular biology as well as a doctorate in biological sciences from NAU. It was while working on her Ph.D., Cope said, that she first became inspired to pursue this field.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started asking questions about which microbes were in the airways of patients with CRS compared to the airways of healthy patients\u2014for example, whether we saw any differences in the microbes present in disease,\u201d she said. \u201cI was inspired by my mentors, Jeff Leid at NAU and our collaborator Noam Cohen at the University of Pennsylvania. And that continued while I was doing my post-doc work at UCSF studying with Susan Lynch, Andrew Goldberg and Steve Pletcher. They\u2019ve all been inspiring.\u201d<\/p>\n

Making the leap: Treating human diseases through systems biology approach<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Cope\u2019s plans for future projects include a study of gut microbiome airway axis, moving toward a clinical study with a cohort of low-income children with asthma in the Phoenix area to determine whether fiber supplements would help treat symptoms.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m interested in answering a range of basic science questions as well as the translational aspects of the work,\u201d Cope said. \u201cOur lab is poised to make the leap from basic research to translational research, applying what we learn to develop therapies that help patients.\u201d<\/p>\n

As she concludes in the mSystems<\/em> paper, \u201cAdvances in our understanding of the microbial mechanisms that drive disease \u2026 will facilitate the development of strategies for microbiome manipulation, which holds great potential for treating a myriad of human diseases. I anticipate that the next five years will bring advances in our understanding of the ecology of airway disease through a systems biology approach.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kerry Bennett Office of the Vice President for Research According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 16 percent of adults in the United States have been diagnosed with chronic rhinosinusitis, or CRS\u2014commonly defined as a sinus infection and inflammation that lasts more than 12 weeks. Not only do CRS patients…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":50822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-academics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}