Rethinking Asthma

Anuradha Ray

Out of the 25 million people with asthma in the United States, 5-10% have severe asthma. Treating them constitutes roughly half of asthma-related health care costs, which are estimated to be over $81 billion, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The usual corticosteroid therapy is ineffective at treating severe asthma, leading to more frequent emergency care and hospitalization, along with greater expenditure for medications for those with severe asthma. 

Anuradha Ray, professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine, and UPMC Endowed Professor of Lung Immunology, takes a novel approach to understanding severe asthma at the level of immune cells, leading to an unprecedented conclusion:  Severe asthma, at the cellular level, behaves like a different disease. An elevated response of a type of T-cell is found in severe, but not mild, asthma and is not affected by even high doses of corticosteroids.

Her work has attracted a stream of funding and earned her a 2023 Pitt Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award. Most recently, she received a prestigious five-year National Institutes of Health MIRA (Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award) intended to provide investigators with greater stability and flexibility, which promises to enhance her lab’s scientific productivity and their chances for
important breakthroughs.

With the support of Pitt’s Innovation Institute, she has applied to patent a technology that significantly reduced symptoms and morbidity in mice. She hopes to develop a similar intervention in the lungs of humans with severe asthma.