One in four people in the United States grapple with allergies, asthma or both. For years, BRI has had its sights set on helping these patients breathe easier. And our efforts just got a huge and welcome boost.

The National Institutes of Health recently awarded BRI $8 million to lead a cooperative research center in Seattle to study the immune system’s responses to allergens in the lungs. This grant means BRI can continue to counterattack allergies and asthma, with the collaborative approach that distinguishes our work and yields powerful results. Findings from the research will be applied to develop new treatments and therapies, helping doctors and patients get the upper hand on what can be extremely disruptive and unpredictable conditions.

Defeating Allergies and Asthma Is a Team Effort

BRI’s Dr. Steven Ziegler will lead the collaboration, which includes eight other principal investigators from BRI, UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s Research Institute.

This combined effort means that researchers will be able to use samples from both children and adults. They’ll also take advantage of a model that closely mimics the structure of the lung to gain insights into the lung epithelium — the interface between the inside of the lung and the outside environment.

How Does the Lung Respond to Disease?

Researchers have zeroed in on the epithelium as potentially pivotal when it comes to outside attacks on the lung.

With the new grant, they’ll test whether airway epithelium cells are the major regulator of responses to things like allergens and respiratory viruses. Based on previous studies, the group predicts that asthmatics and non-asthmatics will differ in terms of how their airway epithelium cells deal with infections and allergic responses.

Fighting to Win

The group will take on multiple projects, each one testing a different aspect of this response, with the epithelium providing the common link between them.

BRI’s expertise across allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases is one of the reasons we’re uniquely positioned to tackle this work. We’ve been able to take our autoimmunity knowledge and research tools and harness them to study allergies and asthma. And when you combine our expertise with that of the UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s Research Institute…allergy and asthma don’t stand a chance.