Hideki Shishido, Ph.D.

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is a life-threatening inherited disease that primarily affects the lungs and digestive system of affected patients. In patients with CF, a protein called the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regu-lator (CFTR) is malformed, causing the lungs to be susceptible to bacterial infections. An important goal of CF therapy is to understand how CFTR acquires its structure and to identify new therapies that assist in prevent-ing this malformation. Dr. Shishido and team are determined to develop an entirely new method to study how different regions of CFTR fold as they are synthesized in the cell. Results will hopefully provide a promising new approach for CF drug discovery that corrects the underlying molecular defect in CF patients.