The Pulmonary Center

http://www.bumc.bu.edu/pulmonarycenter/

Elucidating the biology of healthy lungs.

Discovering mechanisms responsible for pulmonary disease.

Translating basic biology to clinical intervention.

Mission

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– 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)

• 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)

• 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)

• 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

• 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

• 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

T32 (Biology of the Lung: A Multidisciplinary Program) crosses and integrates SFGs

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…

Infection and immunity

Lung development

and regenerative

medicine

Population and patient-

oriented lung research

Section of PCCASM

The Pulmonary Center

http://www.bumc.bu.edu/pulmonarycenter/