Dialing into COPD Management Study

Lungs tend to be under-appreciated and neglected, even though they serve as the body’s filtration workhorse, purifying 10,000 liters of air per day to facilitate a healthy life for each of us. These vital organs can be affected in genetically susceptible individuals when uncontrolled immune responses occur causing a syndrome called allergic asthma.

My interest in science began as an undergraduate student from Sri Lanka learning the basics of molecular biology. I delved deeper and deeper into life sciences, eventually finding my passion for lung immunology and purpose in asking ‘why’.

I began my quest during doctoral training, which focused on the characterization of mechanisms of fungal asthma development. I noticed the scientific community at that time studied asthma by itself even though people who have asthma in the real world frequently have respiratory infections. There was both a need and an opportunity for allergic asthma to be studied coupled with viral and bacterial infections to understand the interplay and treatment opportunities.

Our resulting work demonstrated that having severe asthma with fungal sensitization concurrently with influenza protected the host from virus-induced lung damage, illness and death. This contradicted the adage that asthmatics were worse off in the face of secondary infections; viral or bacterial. Since these anti-dogmatic findings, we have been taking steady strokes to convince the medical community of the treatment opportunities in embracing this phenomenon. The most encouraging news comes from early reports of asthmatics with SARS-CoV-2 virus infection being less likely to develop severe COVID-19. The complexity of maintaining lung health when viral and bacterial infections occur is especially important for patients with genetic susceptibility and underlying chronic diseases. My professional mission, therefore, is to delineate pathways by which this protection against respiratory viral infections is mediated in asthmatics in hopes of designing novel therapeutics against respiratory pathogens that threaten lung health.

Receiving the American Lung Association’s Biomedical Research Grant changed my life as it gave me the confidence and the resources to apply for bigger grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Last year, I received the Charles and Amelia Gould Innovation Award from the Lung Association that allowed me to continue investigation into the role of asthma in protecting against influenza and bacterial pneumonia. Having had the privilege of earning my degrees from the U.S. and rising through the ranks of academia, I consider it my duty to train and empower the next generation of underrepresented minority groups to excel in academic research.