Chitaru Kurihara, MD

While lung transplantation is a life-saving treatment for a variety of end-stage lung diseases, long-term outcomes of patients undergoing this intervention are limited due to the development of chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD). This is a severe lung disease where the immune system attacks the airways of the lungs, also known as chronic rejection.  We will determine whether drugs that we have shown reduce the risk of early graft injury, can reduce the risk of CLAD by reducing precluding normal repair in the lung.

Update:

Approximately 30% of lung transplant patients will develop CLAD within the first three years after lung transplant. In our first year, we have been successful in gathering significant amounts of new data. This has enabled us to show that genetic deletion of white blood cells essential to the immune system called non classical monocytes (NCM) in the donor lung reduce the severity of subsequent CLAD after lung transplant in a mouse model.  We plan to continue studying the effects of deleting donor lung NCMs to see if we can reduce the risk of CLAD.