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<v ->There are an estimated 39.5 million people</v>

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affected with asthma in the United States today.

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And asthma is estimated to cost the US

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roughly 76 to 80 billion dollars each year.

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Now interestingly, only about five to 10 percent

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of asthmatics actually count for over 50%

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of the total asthmatic cost

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and this group is known as the severe asthmatics.

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They are characterized by being poorly responsive

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to inhaled corticosteroids and bronchodilators.

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My research focuses on the hypothesis

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that horses affected with a severe asthma-like disease

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called equine pasture asthma,

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are able to serve as translational models

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for finding novel therapeutic targets of asthma

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specifically to decrease airway hyper-responsiveness,

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which is one of the key features of asthma.

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In work previously done by our lab,

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we have found that horses affected with EPA

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respond to airway spasmogens at diagnostic levels

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that are used to diagnose severe adult asthmatics.

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This is important because traditional animal models

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of asthma, like mice and rats,

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require much higher doses of those airway spasmogens

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to reach those same levels,

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making it really difficult to evaluate

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any new drugs done on these models

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that aim at reducing that airway hyper-responsiveness.

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So to that end, we then took horses

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that were affected with EPA and non-affected

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and we took surgical lung samples,

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as you see in the first picture here,

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and we were able to dissect out those lung samples

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and sequence MRNA looking for protein coding genes

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that specifically increased

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beta two adrenergic receptor signaling.

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Now that's important because beta two

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adrenergic receptor signaling is required

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to actually develop the asthmatic phenotype.

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We were able to find one gene that did just that

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and it was of particular interest to us

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because it has been shown to actually modulate

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the cell membrane potential in the heart

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and able to actually effect when your heart contracts.

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So we then wanted to see where that gene

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was expressed in our horses

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and we saw that in horses affected with EPA,

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versus not, that gene was actually expressed

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in the airway smooth muscle

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more than in controlled horses.

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We then wanted to know what would happen

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if we blocked that gene in bronchial rings

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that were dissected from horses affected with EPA,

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and we suspended those rings in a tissue-backed medium

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that received increasing concentrations

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of an airway spasmogen.

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So we did just that and we saw that in the genes

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that were actually received that blocker,

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they constricted to a much lesser extent

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than those that did not,

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showing us that this gene is important

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and looking at novel therapeutic targets for asthma

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and also shows us the importance

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of using animal models to study disease.

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