A Sigh of Relief?

Each month for 15 years, University at Buffalo researchers took samples from nearly 200 COPD patients. Now all that work is paying off as they learn how to thwart a key pathogen.

The effort has yielded extraordinary information about COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), providing the first insights into how this pathogen adapts to its host in real time over months and even years.

The pathogen, nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi), is the source of much of the misery that COPD patients endure.

Researchers took samples from 192 patients with COPD, obtaining 269 different strains of the pathogen to analyze. 

“Studies until now have been looking at strains grown in labs or stored in freezers,” says Timothy Murphy, director of UB’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. “The power of our study is that we have 269 strains of the pathogen and we can see what it looked like when the patient first acquired the strain and how it changed its genes to survive.”

People with COPD carry the NTHi organism in their lower airways for months to years.

“It’s a hostile environment,” Murphy says. “The little hairs called cilia are continuously trying to get it out of the airway; that’s what makes patients cough. The immune system is bombarding it with antibodies and macrophages.”  

And yet NTHi survives and even thrives. Murphy and his colleagues were determined to learn how—and how it might be overcome.

“What we found is that the Haemophilus influenzae turns genes on and off; it’s constantly changing which genes are activated,” Murphy explains.

That information is critical to potentially developing a vaccine or a treatment.

“Now that we’re beginning to understand how the bacterium is able to survive,” he says, “we can develop ways to eradicate it and improve the lives and health of people with COPD.”