Reseach Description

The central goal of the UC San Diego LungMAP III project is to map across multiple chronic lung diseases for shared and distinct signatures using cutting-edge multi-modal approaches. We will leverage such disease diversity to reveal rich biology. Questions include: 1) how many different types of transitional cells and myofibroblasts are there and how they differ from disease to disease; 2) where are the signaling hubs that drive pathogenesis; 3) do rare cell types change or emerge; 4) can neuroimmune signals be used to define disease-specific cellular communities. We will test the central hypothesis that different lung diseases can be distinguished by a unique set of signatures, including cell type/cell state composition and their spatial organization, transcriptomic and epigenomic profiles, and signaling and extracellular matrix dynamics. In Phase III, we will continue our productivity as in Phase II in producing a large number of datasets for open access by the research community. We will also continue our effort in contributing to resources such as Lung CellCards. We will continue to bring cutting-edge technologies, some developed by our partner at UC San Diego Center for Epigenomics, to the lung community. We expect that the datasets that we will generate in phase III will seed many paradigm-shifting studies by the collective lung research community.