Download The Pulmonary Center Our research enterprise

The Pulmonary Center
http://www.bumc.bu.edu/pulmonarycenter/
Mission
Elucidating the biology of healthy lungs.
Discovering mechanisms responsible for
pulmonary disease.
Translating basic biology to clinical intervention.
Strategy = Research
• Multiple independent research programs
– Faculty-initiated extramurally funded programs
– “Bottom up” design
• Goal of the Center is to facilitate faculty success
– Interactions among independent but complementary
research programs lead to greatest successes
• Training scientists
– MD Pulmonology Fellows
– PhD and MD/PhD students
– PhD students
Research falls into Scientific Focus Groups
• Lung infection and immunity
• Lung development and regenerative medicine
• Population and patient oriented lung research
Designed to foster collaboration by sharing of ideas, approaches, reagents, questions, etc.
Weekly meetings of SFGs, in addition to Center-wide meetings and other smaller meetings.
Shared research space, including open labs.
Lung Infection and Immunity
• Innate immune responses to pathogens in the lung
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Pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis
Antimicrobial host defense
Acute lung injury
Transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation of
cytokines
– Neutrophils, macrophages, epithelial cells
• Adaptive immunity in the airways and lung
– Asthma, pneumonitis, tuberculosis
– Interleukin-16
• cytokine
• transcriptional regulator
– T cells, dendritic cells
Lung Infection and Immunity faculty
(new assistant professors)
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John Bernardo
David Center
Bill Cruikshank
Sue Doctrow
Matt Jones
Michael Ieong
Marty Joyce-Brady
Igor Kramnik
Fred Little
Jay Mizgerd
Lee Quinton
Ross Summer
Lung Development and Regenerative
Medicine
• Normal and abnormal development of the lung
– Lung budding and branching morphogenesis
– Transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of cell differentiation
– Epithelial cells especially
• also smooth muscle cells, neural cells, fibroblasts, macrophages, etc.
– Connective tissue biology, proteoglycans
– Lung hypoplasia and agenesis, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, lung
cancer, lung injury and repair
• Stem cell biology and the lung
– Embryonic stem (ES) cell and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells
– Transitions from stem cells to/through lung lineage differentiation
– Generation of iPS cells from lung disease patients to provide
insights, tools, and therapeutic options
– Emphysema, cystic fibrosis, lung injury and repair
Lung development and regenerative
medicine faculty (new assistant professors)
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Xingbin Ai
Jerry Brody
YuXia Cao
Wellington Cardoso
Felicia Chen
Alan Fine
Arjun Guha
Darrell Kotton
Jining Lu
Laertis Oikonomou
Maria Ramirez
JB Tagne
Mary Williams
Andrew Wilson
Population/patient-oriented lung research
• Population-based approaches to lung disease
– Asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, aging,
pulmonary function, sleep disorders, lung cancer,
pulmonary hypertension, pulmonary amyloidosis, acute
respiratory distress syndrome, sickle cell lung disease, and
more
– Traditional and molecular epidemiology studies
– Genome-wide association studies
• Bioinformatics and lung disease
– Our trainees work with faculty of the Section of
Computational Biomedicine
• Integral to our training mission
– Lung cancer, COPD, cigarette smoking
Population/patient-oriented lung research
faculty (new assistant professors)
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John Berk
Jeff Berman
Chris Campbell-Reardon
Ting Chen
Jack Faling
Hap Farber
Ron Goldstein
Dan Gottlieb
Terese Hammond
Helen Hollingsworth
Joel Karlinsky
Hasmeena Kathuria
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Liz Klings
James Murphy
George O’Connor
Jussi Saukkonen
Frank Schembri
Karin Sloan
Art Theodore
Allan Walkey
Renda Wiener
Kevin Wilson
Scientific training in the Pulmonary Center
T32 (Biology of the Lung: A Multidisciplinary Program) crosses and integrates SFGs
• MD clinical fellows
– 11 slots/year funded by T32
– 5 or 6 new fellows per year, 3-4 year fellowship
• at least 2 years of fellowship are research-focused
• PhD postdocs
– Almost entirely supported by individual PI grants
– Need to develop funding mechanisms
• PhD and MD/PhD students
– 6 slots/year funded by T32
– Faculty members link with many training programs (esp.
Molecular Medicine and Bioinformatics; also Immunology,
Cell & Molecular Biology, Pathology, etc.)
– Need to develop additional funding mechanisms
My perspectives on the
Pulmonary Center
• Productive research group
– Over 12 million dollars per year total in extramural research funding
– Exciting discoveries that result in high impact publications every year
• Productive training program
– continuously funded T32 since 1976, renewed for another 5 years
• anticipated 17 or 18 slots
– high proportion trainees stay in academia, with many becoming
division chiefs, department heads, center directors, and leaders of
lung community (even in BU!)
• Extraordinarily collegial environment
– supportive, caring, fun, productive
• Seamless interactions between basic biology and pulmonary
medicine, across diverse biological and medical interests
– mutually enriching, multidisciplinary
• Emphasis is the science
– what’s good for the science is good for the group
Furthering integration is the goal…
Hematology
Section
Infectious
Diseases
Section
Physiology
Dept
Infection and
immunity
Whitaker
Cardiovascular
Institute
Lung
development
and
regenerative
medicine
Biochemistry
Dept
Pathology
Dept
CReM
Microbiology
Dept
NEIDL
Peds ID
Section of
PCCASM
Sickle Cell
Center
Arthritis
Center
Framingham
Heart Study
Population
and patientoriented lung
research
Amyloid
Program
CTSA
Computational
Biomedicine
School of Section
Public Health
The Pulmonary Center
http://www.bumc.bu.edu/pulmonarycenter/