{"id":57121,"date":"2019-09-26T09:47:06","date_gmt":"2019-09-26T16:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=57121"},"modified":"2019-09-25T16:01:41","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T23:01:41","slug":"cope-respiratory-diseases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/cope-respiratory-diseases\/","title":{"rendered":"NAU researchers seek microbial link between two common and costly respiratory diseases"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sept. 25, 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asthma and chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS)\u2014sinus\ninflammation that lasts for at least three months\u2014are serious and costly\ndiseases, and both are on the rise. According to the American Academy of Allergy,\nAsthma and Immunology, CRS affects up to 16 percent of the U.S. adult\npopulation and eats up a staggering 5 percent of the country\u2019s health care\nbudget each year. Asthma, which involves inflammation of the lower airway,\naffects about 8 percent of the population and costs about $56 billion annually\nin health care and lost time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and\nPrevention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded two Northern\nArizona University researchers $468,472 to study how microbiota in the upper\nand lower airways drive inflammation in patients with these respiratory tract\ndiseases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The human body is home to trillions of microbes, referred to as\nthe microbiome. Most research to date on\nthe microbiome has focused on the intestinal tract. But according to Emily\nCope<\/strong>, assistant professor of biology\nand assistant director of NAU\u2019s Pathogen and Microbiome Institute<\/a> (PMI), the airways also have a diverse\nmicrobial community. She and co-principal investigator Greg Caporaso<\/strong>,associate\nprofessor of biology and director of the Center for Applied Microbiome Science\nin PMI, will lead a three-year project to determine whether microbes in the sinus\ncavity and lungs trigger inflammation in patients with both CRS and asthma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While inflammation is a normal and\nnecessary part of the healing process, sometimes it results from a misguided\nimmune response to a perceived but nonexistent threat. In other words, the\nimmune system attacks the body\u2019s own cells, thinking they are intruders, which can\nlead to CRS and asthma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCurrently,\nthese diseases are treated separately, but people with CRS often have asthma,\nleading us to believe there might be a common cause,\u201d Cope said. \u201cSurprisingly, the sinus and lung\nmicrobiome of CRS and asthma patients have not been studied in tandem.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having either condition can be miserable,\nand suffering from both can be debilitating. According to Cope, people with CRS\nreport worse quality of life than people with chronic back pain, diabetes or\nangina. If the team can figure out whether the microbiome of the upper and\nlower airways is what links CRS and asthma, more effective treatment options\ncould become available. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\nknow that microbial metabolites often interact with the immune system. This\nstudy will help us figure out whether these metabolites trigger an inflammatory\nresponse,\u201d she said. \u201cIf we figure out that the diseases are microbial in\norigin, that can pave the way for microbiome-based therapeutics. Ideally, treatments\ncould target the upper airway (sinus) microbiome\u2014which is much easier to reach\nthan the lungs and much more tolerable for the patient\u2014to ease both conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Multilayered\nstudy designed to stimulate students <\/strong>to\nconsider careers in biomedical science<\/strong><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Funded through the NIH grant, Cope,\nCaporaso and several students will\nstudy the sinus and lung microbiomes in healthy subjects and CRS patients with\nand without asthma by using next-generation sequencing and metabolomic\nanalysis. The team will also study the immune responses in each airway site to\ndetermine whether a correlation exists between changes in the microbiome and\ninflammation. To understand how the altered respiratory microbiota contribute\nto inflammation, they will conduct laboratory experiments that expose immune\ncells to microbial metabolites from CRS patients with asthma. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re collaborating with clinicians at\nthe University of California San Francisco who are collecting samples during\nsurgical procedures in the form of sinus and lung swabs,\u201d Cope said. \u201cAll the\nsamples will be analyzed in our lab at NAU.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One\ngraduate student and at least three undergraduates will be involved in all\nphases of the project, including traveling to UCSF to shadow the clinicians and\nobserve sample collection. Cope will mentor students in the laboratory, and\nCaporaso will guide students in bioinformatics analysis of the microbiome data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe students will contribute from\nbeginning to end,\u201d Cope said. \u201cTheir involvement includes conducting lab work, observing\nclinical and surgical procedures, analyzing data and publication of our\nfindings. The multiple layers of this project will stimulate our students to\nconsider careers in biomedical science and give them a good foundation for what\nto expect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cope\u2019s lab<\/a> focuses on human\nmicrobiota (bacteria, fungi and viruses that inhabit a body site) in chronic\nairway diseases. CRS is a primary focus at her laboratory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Caporaso lab<\/a> uses applied bioinformatics\nfocusing on microbiome research, software development and bioinformatics\neducation. All software and educational content developed in the Caporaso lab is\nopen source and available free of charge to support open science and education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"NAU<\/figure>
\n

Kerry Bennett and Amy K. Phillips
Office of the Vice President for Research<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sept. 25, 2019 Asthma and chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS)\u2014sinus inflammation that lasts for at least three months\u2014are serious and costly diseases, and both are on the rise. According to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, CRS affects up to 16 percent of the U.S. adult population and eats up a staggering 5 percent of…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":57123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57121","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\/57121","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=57121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}