PhD candidate, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, School NUTRIM / Department of Respiratory Medicine

Introduction

According to the World Health Organization, lung diseases are the number one cause of death worldwide. Lung diseases almost without exception lead to extremely debilitating symptoms and loss of quality of life and productivity. Therefore, the Precision Medicine for more Oxygen (P4O2) program aims to identify treatable traits and innovative personalized therapeutic strategies to both prevent progression of early stage damage and to reverse established lung and systemic damage by stimulating tissue repair.

Environmental exposure to noxious compounds (external exposome) is a well-known trigger for chronic lung diseases. One of the hypotheses tested in this project of P4O2 is that the lifestyle-related ‘internal exposome’ modulates the sensitivity of the lungs to damage, with a central role for metabolically active tissues like skeletal muscle.

Consequently, a fundamental understanding of the underlying tissue crosstalk and cellular interactions will provide a mechanistic basis to modify or reverse the development of chronic lung disease.

A full description of the P4O2 program and consortium can be found on: https://p4o2.org/

Job Description

Environmental exposure to noxious compounds (external exposome) is a well-known trigger for chronic lung diseases. One of the hypotheses tested in this project of P4O2 is that the lifestyle-related ‘internal exposome’ modulates the sensitivity of the lungs to damage, with a central role for metabolically active tissues like skeletal muscle. Consequently, a fundamental understanding of the underlying tissue crosstalk and cellular interactions will provide a mechanistic basis to modify or reverse the development of chronic lung disease.

To this end novel skeletal muscle cell culture models to mimic and modulate life style determinants of muscle metabolism and secretory actions will be developed, as well as organ on chip approaches to model lung-muscle interactions in vitro. With these advanced cell models into place, the impact of lung and muscle crosstalk on damage and repair responses following external exposome stimuli and internal exposome modulation will be investigated.

 This project will be completed within the Department of Respiratory Medicine, with a long standing interest in lung - muscle interactions in lung disease, including COPD and lung cancer. As this project is embedded within the P4O2 program, the work will be performed in collaboration with academic partners at the UMCG and LUMC.