Understanding the interactions of the lung microbiome and its relationship with differential protein - transcriptomic and cellular data

Lead Research Organisation: Imperial College London
Department Name: National Heart and Lung Institute

Abstract

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of the airway that mostly responds to topical corticosteroids. However, 5-10% of patients have severe disease that fails to respond well to treatment. These bioinformatic projects utilise multi-omic data obtained from the pan-European U-BIOPRED severe asthma cohort to investigate the role of the microbiome in directing biological processes associated with subtypes of severe asthma whilst the second project uses network fusion and other approaches to merge different omics datasets and investigate drug responses. The projects will involve state-of-the-art bioinformatics approaches to analyse metagenomic, genetic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomics data stored within the TransMart KM system.

Publications

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Kermani NZ (2021) Sputum ACE2, TMPRSS2 and FURIN gene expression in severe neutrophilic asthma. in Respiratory research

 
Description Within the lung microbiome of severely asthmatic patients, there is an increased occurance of bacterial outgrowths which results in a reduced diversity of the lung microbiome. Haemophilus influenzae, Moraxella catarrhalis and Streptococcus pseudopneumoniae are the most occuring bacterial outgrowth within the severe asthamtic patients. The high abundance Haemophilus influenzae in severe asthmatics is stable in the long term, which concurs with the hypothesis that high abundance of Haemophilus influenzae correlates with long term steroid insensitivity in some servere asthamtic patients.
Exploitation Route Other researchers could test whether targetting and inhibiting Haemophilus influenzae growth would result in a greater lung microbiome diversity in severely asthamtic patients and would result in a reduction in steriod insensitivity long term, which could result in better disease management and improved patient outcomes.
Sectors Healthcare