Discovery of the pathogenesis and targets in the progression of early chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

This project is aimed to investigate and explore the heterogeneity during the progression of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) in the early stage, utilizing the large-scale population cohort databases (including "China Pulmonary Health study", "The Cohort Study for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in China" and "Acute Exacerbation of COPD Patient Registry in China" ), biological sample libraries(including blood, sputum, expiratory air, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid(BALF), and lung tissue from COPD patients with different stages and phenotypes), and multi-omics sequencing (including scRNA-seq, metabolomics, proteomics, and metagenome). We propose to establish a new standard for COPD stages and subtypes. By analyzing and mining the multi-omics data, it is expected to illustrate the association between clinical phenotype and molecular, cellular and tissue heterogeneities, thus reveal biomarkers related to the progression, clinical phenotypes, and prognosis of early-stage COPD disease.In addition, we will construct different types and stages of COPD animal models for further mechanism studies, such as the different pathogenic factors, innate and adaptive immunity, and the airway microbial ecosystem, so that we can discovered more potential therapeutic target for early-stage COPD. This project can bring a new insight and scientific evidence for COPD treatment.

Inclusion Criteria:

• younger than 50 years
• smoking more than 10 pack-years
• early airflow limitation(post-bronchodilator FEV1/FVC< lower limit of normal)

Exclusion Criteria:

• cancer
• other respiratory diseases
• mental illness

early COPD patients and healthy controls