Dawei Sun, PhD

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a severe lung complication that significantly contributes to influenza and COVID-19 deaths. ARDS development is closely associated with impaired regeneration of the lung’s tiny air sacs, the alveoli. But the reasons for this remain poorly understood. We will uncover how changes in gene regulation (epigenetics) affect healing of the alveoli. This will pave the way to identify novel treatments to enhance alveoli regeneration and combat disease progression.

Update: We are studying how epigenetic regulators control lung repair after severe viral injury. Our work focuses on Kat8, a gene identified through our in vivo genetic screen, as an important regulator of alveolar type 2 cells, which are the stem-like cells responsible for rebuilding the lung’s gas-exchange surface. Over the past year, we optimized an efficient gene knockout platform in these cells, established a precision-cut lung slice model to study alveolar differentiation, and built a new screening library to map histone acetylation regulators during regeneration. Together, these advances provide the foundation for the next phase of the project, in which we will test whether loss of Kat8 causes lung stem-like cells to become unhealthy, stop dividing or lose their ability to rebuild the alveoli. In the long term, this work may help identify new therapeutic strategies to improve lung repair and prevent progressive scarring (fibrosis) after severe respiratory injury.