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INVITED LECTURE AT KYUNG HEE UNIVERSITY MEDICAL SCHOOL

Dr. David Cho has been a faculty member and allergy specialist at Northwestern Medical School for two years and was currently invited as an “International Scholar” from Kyung Hee University Medical School. An “International Scholar” is a visiting professorship to invite internationally renowned professors from other countries to promote research and learn cutting edge knowledge in their field. Dr. Cho was named as one of two international scholars from the medical school last year and this year. He stayed in Korea for three and a half weeks, giving several lectures and establishing collaboration with several faculty members in the medical school. The title of his main lecture was “Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor-1 and Airway Remodeling in Asthma.”

Dr. David Cho has been doing research on asthma since he was at UCLA medical school. Asthma in the United States affects more than 24 million people and it is one of the most common chronic diseases of childhood, affecting an estimated 6 million children. Asthma is believed to be a reversible disorder, characterized by airway inflammation and airway hyperactivity. Some asthma patients show irreversible structural changes of their airways, referred to as “airway remodeling” which leads to unresponsiveness to asthma medications and even to death (4,000-5,000 a year). His research is aimed at understanding why some asthma patients develop airway remodeling despite proper asthma medications such as steroid inhalers.

A protein, called plasminogen activator inhibitor-1, has been known to be important in cardiovascular diseases such as coronary artery disease, stroke, and atherosclerosis. However, nothing about this protein had been known in asthma until he and his colleagues found that genetically engineered mice that are missing this protein generated much less airway remodeling after inducing allergic asthma. Now he is investigating to better understand how the irreversible airway changes happen in asthma patients and to find out the way to reverse these changes so that severe asthma patients (who are frequently seeking emergency care or staying at the hospital, or who even end up dying, despite current proper medications such as corticosteroids) may have a new treatment option to avoid or relieve these irreversible consequences of asthma.