Our Research Programmes

Infections

Virus infections are very strongly linked to acute attacks of asthma - Respiratory tract viruses are detected in 80-100% of acute wheezing attacks in infants and young children, around 80-85% in school age children and around 70-75% in adults. All respiratory viruses are able to provoke acute attacks of asthma but the most prominent are rhinoviruses which cause around two-thirds of such attacks, influenza during the annual epidemics and RSV is prominent in severe wheezing illness in infants as well. We recently demonstrated that people with asthma have increased susceptibility to respiratory virus infection in that when infected with rhinoviruses, they get much more severe lower respiratory symptoms and reductions in their lung function than normal people do. We focussed our recent work on trying to understand why this is the case and have recently shown that lung cells from people with asthma replicate rhinoviruses much better than lung cells from normal individuals and have identified deficiencies in two families of anti-viral proteins that normally protect people from respiratory virus infections. Our current studies are focussed on trying to understand why people with asthma are deficient in these anti-viral proteins, whether they have other forms of immunodeficiency that increase their susceptibility to infection and whether we can devise new approaches to treatment that would correct these deficiencies and protect people with asthma against respiratory virus infections, thereby preventing or treating acute attacks of asthma.