Megumi Shigematsu, PhD

Asthma is a common chronic inflammatory disease affecting over 300 million people worldwide. Patients with asthma often exhibit severe exacerbations, with some cases fatal or near fatal. Despite several decades of research, there is still a need for more effective asthma medications. Thus, studies of key pathological players at molecular levels are yet required. Although airway remodeling such as thickening of airway walls are a common manifestation, it is not clear how it is initially triggered upon allergen exposure. We discovered novel small RNA molecules which are highly upregulated in asthma and are involved in airway remodeling, which could be the critical trigger to remodeling. Our research will further explore this potential mechanism at the molecular level, which will lead to next-generation therapies that inhibit airway remodeling in early asthma. 

Update:
We have now included COPD samples in addition to asthma for this study on small RNAs because asthma and COPD have a similar course of disease development and there are a large number of COPD cases. We obtained lung tissue and plasma samples from patients, and initially established a quantitative method that specifically detects the targeted small RNAs. We found that small RNAs were increased in the COPD plasma. We have developed a method to amplify small RNAs derived from patient plasma for sequencing by next-generation sequencing (NGS) in order to identify specific small RNAs. Currently, we are analyzing NGS data to analyze differences between COPD and healthy plasma. These findings have the potential to greatly advance our understanding and treatment of chronic respiratory diseases.