
Chicago's Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine will lead a $12 million, National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to study the negative impact of neutrophils in asthma and other lung diseases.
Specifically, university researchers will collaborate with other institutions to identify mechanisms that determine how lung neutrophils drive tissue injury, inflammation and repair in patients with asthma, severe pneumonia and lung transplantation. Neutrophils are cells that are responsible for lung inflammation and injury as well as repair.
Benjamin D. Singer, MD
The grant, “The Neu-Lung Consortium: Neutrophilic Mechanisms of Inflammation, Injury, and Repair in Lung and Airways Diseases,” is part of the NIH Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ U19 Cooperative Centers in Human Immunology. Northwestern is one of five sites selected for this award. In addition to Singer, the grant is led by Stephanie Eisenbarth, MD, PhD, chief of allergy and immunology and director of the Center for Human Immunobiology at Feinberg, and Alexander Misharin, MD, PhD, associate professor of Medicine in the division of pulmonary and critical care.
Grant partners include the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, National Jewish Health in Denver, the University of Colorado Children’s Hospital in Denver and the University of Calgary in Canada.