We fund researchers to understand how we can better prevent, diagnose and treat lung conditions.
Mesothelioma
Title: 'SELECTmeso2' - A clinical trial to test a targeted therapy in patients with relapsed mesothelioma
Start date: TBC
Duration: 3 years
Funding: £418,971.74
What does this mean for people living with mesothelioma?
Decitabine (deh-SY-tuh-been) is a chemotherapy drug that’s used to treat blood cancer by reducing the cancer cells grow. This is a Phase II clinical trial determining if this treatment can also work to treat mesothelioma recurrence (when cancer returns after a period of time) in people who’s mesothelioma is initially caused by a mutation in the cancer gene: BAP1. It will be offered to people who currently don’t have any other treatment options. This work builds on a previous Asthma + Lung UK-funded clinical trial (MIST) which showed that personalised drug treatments is a possibility for mesothelioma.
Title: What is the role of the fibroblast in mesothelioma?
Project type: Mesothelioma Project Grant
Start date: 1 October 2024
Duration: 3 years
Funding: £334,764.43
What does this mean for people living with mesothelioma?
Mesothelioma tumours are composed of fibroblast cells which can cause lung scaring. This scar tissue takes over the tumour and helps cancer cells resist treatment. Current treatments don’t target fibroblasts because their interaction with cancer cells is not well understood. This project will investigate exactly how fibroblasts are interacting with these cancer cells so we can learn more about how mesothelioma progresses, and how to treat it.
Title: Using fluid build up around the lungs of patients to diagnose pleural mesothelioma
Project Type: Mesothelioma Project Grant
Start date: TBC
Duration: 2 years
Funding: £156,435.00
What does this mean for people living with mesothelioma?
Pleural effusion is fluid that builds up in the lung lining and can be the first symptom of mesothelioma. This projects aims to develop a diagnostic test that can assess cells present in this fluid to diagnose mesothelioma earlier. This test would help reduce diagnostic waiting times, and further, reduce the number of people waiting for treatment; overall, improving survival times. It would also be less invasive than current tests for mesothelioma.
Title:
Project type: Mesothelioma Pump-priming grant
Start date: 23/07/2024
Duration: 1 year
Funding: £40,000
What does this mean for people living with mesothelioma?
Mesothelioma develops quickly, making it difficult to treat. This project will take a closer look at how certain cells interact which cause the cancer to progress and become less responsive to treatment. This will be used to see if existing drugs can be used to treat mesothelioma.
Pulmonary Fibrosis and COPD
Title: Investigating the role of immune cells in the early stages of pulmonary fibrosis
Project type: Early Career Starter Grant
Start date: 01/12/2024
Duration: 18 months
Funding: £99,673.43
What does this mean for people living with PF?
This project looks at how our immune system cells are contributing to early scarring to better understand, and identify ways to treat, pulmonary fibrosis. This will be done using software to accurately and efficiently assess CT scans.
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/08/2024
Duration: 1 year
Funding: £99,030.41
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
White blood cells called eosinophils encourage inflammation in the airways of people with COPD, increasing their risk of acute flare-ups. This project is looking to understand how eosinophils behave in different people with COPD, as well as people not living with COPD. These results will help to design new treatments that can reduce COPD symptoms.
Title: Preventing acute worsening of lung symptoms, hospital admissions and deaths in patients with COPD or lung scarring (fibrosis) through anti-diabetes medications
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 13/02/2025
Duration: 17 months
Funding: £100,000.00
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
Metformin, a medicine that treats diabetes, has already been found to reduce asthma attacks by one third. This project will investigate if it can also be used for COPD and IPF. To do this, the team are using advanced statistics to examine existing data records from people’s GPs to determine if there is a link between metformin prescription and a reduction in exacerbations of COPD and IPF in people in the real world.
Title: How do cell communicate with each other in lungs? Implication in the ageing of the lungs in COPD patients
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/10/2025
Duration: 13 months
Funding: £100,000
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
The lungs age quicker for people living with COPD and they usually have multiple conditions at the same time. We think we know why. This project is looking further into ways that cells in the lungs cause these changes and how we might be able to stop this. This research could accelerate the development of new treatments looking to stop COPD progressing.
Title: Exploring the protein Tead4 as a potential treatment option for the disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 18/11/2024
Duration: 15 months
Funding: £99,275.00
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
Tead4 is a protein that could be involved in the development of IPF by interacting with cells in the lungs and contributing to the production of scar tissue. This project will take a closer look at the behaviour of this protein, and determine if we can use existing treatments to stop the activity of it; therefore, improving the lives of people living with IPF.
Title: Investigating how scar proteins communicate with immune cells and worsen disease, to improve diagnosis and treatment of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/09/2024
Duration: 18 months
Funding: £99,957.53
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
This project wants to understand why some people with IPF experience a quicker deterioration in their symptoms than others, and why they may experience more exacerbations. Learning the specific mechanisms behind this will support the development of future diagnostic tests, and potentially more personalised treatment pathways.
Title: Genes, Asthma and COPD: solving the triad
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/01/2025
Duration: 18 months
Funding: £85,728.40
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
How genetically similar are asthma and COPD, and could existing drugs be repurposed to treat these earlier, and slow down disease progression? That’s what Ahmed is looking to find out by identifying early indicators of asthma and COPD in people who show features of both of the conditions (called ‘asthma and COPD overlap’).
Asthma
Title: Can we use new breathing tests to better diagnose asthma?
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/10/2024
Duration: 18 months
Funding: £63,574
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
This project wants to see how we can more accurately diagnose asthma through using a combination of newly developed breath tests. The results of this study will inform future research to determine a new and inexpensive method of testing for asthma that can be widely used across the UK, and potentially provide more personalised treatment.
Title: Investigate how lung scaffold proteins impact newborn immune cell function
Project type: Early Career Starter Grant
Start date: 01/08/2024
Duration: 18 months
Funding: £99,945.43
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
Our lungs contain scaffold-like structures called the extracellular matrix – these hold our lung cells together, and help them move around when we breath in and out. In children with wheeze or asthma, the extracellular matrix doesn’t behave like it should. This project is investigating what might be affecting it in our very early lives that could lead to children struggling to breathe later on.
Dr Franz Puttur is going to mimic a child’s lung system in a lab using cells from young people. His work will aim to develop new understanding of biological pathways (what systems are going wrong and when) in the immune cells that exist in our lungs.
Title: Mapping asthma's memory lane: Decoding the bacterial patterns of macrophage memory
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/09/2024
Duration: 16 months
Funding: £63,574
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
Biomarkers are signals that act as helpful ‘flags’ that tell us what is happening in the body. This work will identify which biomarkers are associated with bacteria that disrupt the immune system and cause asthma attacks. The findings will be used to develop a new diagnostic approach to help predict and prevent exacerbations, leading to better treatment strategies for people living with asmtha.
Title: Prediction of future asthma in wheezy children
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/09/2024
Duration: 18 months
Funding: £96,917.00
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
We know that around one third of children will have an episode of wheezing by the time they are 3 years old. However, we can’t accurately predict which children living with recurrent wheeze, will go on to develop asthma. Dr Kyyaly is looking to develop a more accurate test of asthma risk in children. This will help to diagnose asthma earlier and provide closer monitoring for doctors to recommend suitable treatments earlier.
Title: Adding Glycine to inhalers to improve asthma control
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/09/2024
Duration: 16 months
Funding: £98,996.00
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
Dr Chakraborty is looking into whether a natural compound called glycine can be added to the inhaled steroids we already use to make asthma medicine more effective and produce less side-effects. They’ll be looking at when it’s best to use glycine and how it helps with asthma in detail. This will lead to a larger project that will support the use of glycine with steroids, ultimately making breathing easier for everyone with asthma.
Infections
Title: Investigating the long-term effects of tuberculosis on lung health and general wellbeing in a group of patients treated in Liverpool
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: TBC
Duration: 18 months
Funding: £98,113.25
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
Around half of people with tuberculosis have pulmonary tuberculosis lung disease (PTB); an infection that affects the lung. This project will gather lots of initial data on the prevalence of PTB, and aim to better understand its patterns, causes, and effects to determine how these people can be better supported.
Multi-condition and breathlessness
Title: Seeking help for breathlessness in different communities
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/10/2024
Duration: 18 months
Funding: £86,117.85
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
Not everyone will get the help they need for breathlessness when the need it. This project will focus on how people from minority ethnic communities seek help for breathlessness so that we can better support people to seek help sooner. The results from this project will inform the design of a larger study looking at how to speed up diagnosis of lung conditions in people with breathlessness.
Title: Genes, Asthma and COPD: solving the triad
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/01/2025
Duration: 18 months
Funding: £85,728.40
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
How genetically similar are asthma and COPD, and could existing drugs be repurposed to treat these earlier, and slow down disease progression? That’s what Ahmed is looking to find out by identifying early indicators of asthma and COPD in people who show features of both of the conditions (called ‘asthma and COPD overlap’).
Title: Investigate how lung scaffold proteins impact newborn immune cell function
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/08/2024
Duration: 18 months
Funding: £99,945.43
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
Our lungs contain scaffold-like structures called the extracellular matrix – these hold our lung cells together, and help them move around when we breath in and out. In children with wheeze or asthma, the extracellular matrix doesn’t behave like it should. This project is investigating what might be affecting it in our very early lives that could lead to children struggling to breathe later on.
Dr Franz Puttur is going to mimic a child’s lung system in a lab using cells from young people. His work will aim to develop new understanding of biological pathways (what systems are going wrong and when) in the immune cells that exist in our lungs.
Bronchiectasis
Title: Can laughing help people manage their bronchiectasis?
Project Type: Early Career Start Grant
Start date: 01/05/2025
Duration: 18 months
Funding: £99,199.15
What does this mean for people living with a lung condition?
Bronchectasis is a chronic condition that causes mucus to build up in people’s lungs. Laughter, something we all do naturally, has previously been found to cause vibrations in our throat and airways that can help loosen this mucus and clear space in people’s lungs so they can breathe easier. This project is investing whether prescribed laughter therapy can help with bronchiectasis as well as relive symptoms of anxiety and depression that are often associated with chronic lung conditions.
