Maria Basil
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a very common lung disease, and it damages the smallest airways of the human lung, the respiratory bronchioles. Mice lack these airways, so their role in lung injury and repair is largely unknown.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biology
Genetics
- Topics
lung regeneration
lung stem cells
respiratory bronchioles
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Test whether Notch signaling, a cell-to-cell communication pathway, controls the identity of respiratory airway secretory cells (RASCs) and their ability to produce alveolar type 2 cells, using human embryonic stem cell models.
- Determine how the transcription factor SOX4, a protein that switches genes on, regulates RASC fate and progenitor function, using gene editing and next-generation sequencing.
- Determine how RASC progenitor function is altered in COPD, using epigenetic analysis of primary human lung tissue and advanced bioinformatics.
More about the research
Learning how the cells in this region repair the lung, and how that goes wrong in COPD, could reveal new ways to treat the disease.
Why it matters
People with COPD may lose some of the lung's ability to heal itself if their RASCs, a newly found human lung stem cell, function poorly. Learning how Notch signaling and SOX4 control these cells could point to new treatment targets for COPD and could inform strategies for lung regeneration more broadly.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hong-Long Ji
Loyola University Chicago, IL·Medicine & Clinical Research
Rank the leading predictors of death in alcoholic and nonalcoholic ARDS patients across 1,204 clinical variables from NIH-funded clinical trials, combining random forest models with SHAP, a method that shows each variable's influence.
Christin Kuo
Stanford University, CA·Biology
Identify and characterize a subset of neuroendocrine progenitors (NEPr) in distal human airway neuroepithelial bodies, using precision cut lung slice cultures from healthy adult lungs.
Vladimir Kalinichenko
University of Arizona, AZ·Physiology
Determine why P22-F1 PBAE/PEI/PEG nanoparticles home to lung capillary endothelial cells and no other organ, tracing cell-surface binding, uptake into the cell, escape from internal vesicles, and release of the DNA cargo.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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