Specifically, the overall goal of our project is to understand how variation in the human genome makes lung diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, acute lung injury, pulmonary arterial hypertension, and cystic fibrosis more severe in some people than in others.
Abigail Bigham, Ph.D.: We don't really understand the genetic causes for why certain people are more susceptible to particular heart and lung conditions versus other folks. And so research such as this will really begin to unfold what those causes of those particular conditions are and really be able to help people who are afflicted with these diseases to improve their lives.
Ronald Gibson, M.D., Ph.D.: As a pediatric pulmonologist, I take care of children with cystic fibrosis (CF). And this stimulus money is going to allow us to actually do the studies to identify genetic modifiers of CF lung disease and CF lung infection. So this has given us a very unique and exciting opportunity to study this in CF. And this is very important not only to care providers, but you can imagine how important it is to the families and the patients to get new information about how we can better treat CF lung disease and early CF lung infections.
Rose Howard, Administrative Specialist, University of Washington: The hiring capabilities that this funding has given us, we're really excited about the opportunities that it's opening up to hire new administration staff, research staff, to participate in the reporting and the overall research of this project.
Dr. Bamshad: The Recovery Act gives us the opportunity to explore some of those opportunities very quickly and to hopefully translate that into new therapeutics, new clinical management schemes, and certainly an opportunity to understand the basic biology of many of the lung diseases that have perplexed us for a long time.
NHLBI AND THE RECOVERY ACT
