Biobank of airway biopsies

A Southampton Clinical Research Facility success story.

Researchers carried out fibreoptic bronchoscopy on healthy volunteers, and volunteers with either asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

This generated a unique biobank of airway biopsies in these three groups of volunteers.

This resource has been used to discover a major defect in innate immunity of asthmatic and COPD epithelial cells: a defect in beta- and lambda-inteferon production makes these cells unable to effectively eliminate the common cold virus (rhinovirus).

This defect explains the increased susceptibility of these patients to virus-induced exacerbations, a major unmet clinical need.

The paper 'Asthmatic Bronchial Epithelial Cells Have a Deficient Innate Immune Response to Infection with Rhinovirus' was published on 21 March 2005 in the 'Journal of Experimental Medicine' (volume 201, no. 6, 937-947).

Find out more about the Southampton Clinical Research Facility.