Biomedical Vacation Scholarship, Assessing alveolar macrophage responses to inhaled medicines

Lung diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are an increasing global health burden affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Despite considerable investment on the development of new treatments for these diseases, very few new medicines for the treatment of asthma or COPD have made it to market in the past thirty years. One of the main reasons for this is concerns over the safety of new inhaled medicines and a lack of understanding of how they interact with the immune system in the lungs. The aim of this project is to improve the understanding of how the main immune cells in the lungs (alveolar macrophages) respond to inhaled medicines. Established in-house cell models of the lungs will used to investigate responses to marketed inhaled medicines and drug compounds known to cause inflammation in the lungs. By gaining a better understanding of these interactions in cell models, better safety predictions will be able to be made for new inhaled medicines, which may also help reduce the number of animal studies required for safety predictions. This will help further the understanding of small lung disease and aid new medicines for lung disease reach the market.