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In a discovery which might lead to better drugs for severe asthmatic patients,British scientists have found the key element which remodells the lung’s airways causing the disease.
Scientists from King’s College London and Imperial College London have discovered during their research that the structure and function of asthmatic lung airways are changed or “remodelled” gradually due to irritants such as dust,pollen,mould,viruses and bacteria in the air they breathe leading to chronic asthma.
The researchers studied muscle cells from the airways of people with asthma and found that a lack of SERCA,an element which controls calcium intake in cells of lung airway muscles caused them to multiply and become larger,increasing their ability to squeeze the airways causing asthma symptoms.
“The function of the muscle surrounding the airways (airway smooth muscle) is very dependent on the amount of calcium that is freely available inside the cell.
One of the important mechanisms that regulate this “free” calcium is a pump called SERCA,which pumps calcium into the cell so that it is no longer freely available”,Professor Jeremy Ward,Head of Department of Physiology,King’s College London said in an email interview.
“The key finding of our research is that the amount of SERCA is reduced in airway smooth muscle from asthmatics compared to healthy individuals,with the consequence that cell calcium is less well regulated.
We have also shown that if we artificially reduce SERCA in airway smooth muscle cells taken from healthy people,then these cells behave just like cells taken from people with asthma”,explains Ward.
Airway remodelling is apparent even in the lungs of young children with asthma,and can make the condition almost impossible to control. There is no known way of reversing airway remodelling once it has occurred.
“Now we have identified that SERCA is reduced in asthma,we can start to examine why this occurs,and how we might prevent or reverse it. If we could develop new treatments that restore SERCA to normal,we may finally have an effective treatment for severe asthma,something that has so far eluded us”,said Ward.
“This is a really exciting development in asthma research because it brings us a step further to replacing potentially misleading animal models with more human-relevant approaches that could hasten the development of more appropriate and effective treatments,” said Dr Sebastien Farnaud,Science Director at the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research.
The research has been published in a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
