Juan Carlos Cardet, M.D.

Nearly half of patients with severe asthma are inadequately treated by existing and often expensive therapies. Investigating genetic variation may lead to a better understanding of severe asthma and more effective and cheaper therapies. Our group found that variation in the RGS2 gene relates to having mild asthma. We will now examine the genes of patients with severe asthma from large, multi-ethnic studies to see if variation in RGS2 and other RGS genes relates to severe asthma. We will determine whether airway cells engineered to contain these RGS genetic variations behave more like asthmatic airway cells. Our goal is to find genetic markers that can inform us whether there are existing therapies that work especially well in patients with those genetic markers, and whether developing new therapies that target RGS molecules are even better for these patients.