FILE: Cedars-Sinai’s Mark Goodson Building, February 21, 2024. Photo: Jengod / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; cropped and resized. Adapted image: CC BY-SA 4.0.
Cedars-Sinai has received more than $12 million from the National Institutes of Health to study why viral infections can leave some people with lung scarring that does not heal, the health system announced November 12.
The five-year effort will examine how infections damage the lungs and interfere with their ability to repair themselves. Researchers hope to find signs that could help doctors detect scarring earlier and identify possible targets for future treatments.
The award funds research, not a newly approved treatment. The announcement does not report that the teams have reversed lung damage in patients.
Lung scarring is known as pulmonary fibrosis. Respiratory infections, including flu and COVID-19, can damage the alveoli, the tiny air sacs where oxygen passes into the blood and carbon dioxide leaves it. The research will look at why that damage sometimes persists.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of NIH, awarded the grant. It will support 12 investigators working on three research projects and four shared research support units.
Peter Chen, director of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Cedars-Sinai and the effort’s principal investigator, will lead a team studying how viruses change lung stem cells and reduce their ability to repair damaged tissue.
A University of Virginia team led by Jie Sun will examine how the immune response can create conditions in the lungs that encourage scarring. Another Cedars-Sinai team, led by researcher Xue Liu, will study how signals in virus-damaged lungs can cause healthy cells to become scar-forming cells.
The work builds on earlier research in laboratory mice led by Chen and Sun. That research identified a pathway through which immune cells keep lungs from healing after viral infections. The new award will support further study of the underlying processes; the mouse findings are not proof of a treatment’s effectiveness in people.
Chen said researchers also want to understand whether repeated viral infections, along with factors such as genetics and environmental exposures, make some people more vulnerable to lung scarring than others.
Source: Cedars-Sinai.
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