Strategic Program For Asthma Research Awards UTMB Professor $750,000 Grant

Main Category: Respiratory / Asthma
Also Included In: Immune System / Vaccines;  Clinical Trials / Drug Trials
Article Date: 09 Jul 2008 - 3:00 PDT

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The Strategic Program for Asthma Research has awarded University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston professor Satish Srivastava a three-year, $750,000 grant to pursue an innovative approach to asthma therapy.

Srivastava will use the award to examine the link between the enzyme aldose reductase and asthma-related lung inflammation. Previous research by Srivastava's group has shown that this enzyme is essential to inflammatory mechanisms in colon cancer, diabetic cardiovascular complications, autoimmune disease, sepsis and uveitis.

"I'm very grateful to SPAR for this award and the chance to make a difference in fighting a disease that causes so much suffering," Srivastava said. "My colleagues and I have reason to believe that aldose reductase is just as important to the inflammatory processes that drive asthma pathogenesis as it is to those in other diseases we're studying, and we think pursuing this line of research will have a significant impact."

SPAR, funded by the Sandler Foundation of San Francisco, seeks to foster highly original asthma research by supporting investigators who have distinguished themselves in other disciplines for work on asthma. SPAR awards are also highly competitive - Srivastava was one of only 17 researchers funded this year out of 222 applicants.

Srivastava's confidence comes in large part from his group's successes in numerous animal studies of therapies that involve compounds that inhibit the action of aldose reductase and stop disease by interrupting inflammation. Some of these aldose reductase inhibitors are not far from clinical application in humans, and have already been found safe in Phase 3 clinical trials for diabetic neuropathy that lasted a year or more.

"We've demonstrated the critical role played by this enzyme in so many different inflammatory disease models - the key biochemical signaling pathways all have to pass through it to activate inflammation - that it seems likely it would be involved in asthma, too," Srivastava says. "Now we're going to get an opportunity to apply what we've learned in all this other research to asthma, and I think SPAR is going to be very pleased with the results."

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The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
Public Affairs Office
301 University Boulevard, Suite 3.102
Galveston, Texas 77555-0144
http://www.utmb.edu/

Source: Jim Kelly
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

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