Mechanisms and Impact of Bacterial Colonisation in COPD

Work package one involves the consolidation and further characterisation of a number of pre-existing UK-based clinical cohorts of patients with COPD. This involves collection of epidemiological and physiological data from patients and controls to enable a complete definition of disease phenotype. Work package two will examine microbiological and innate immune parameters in this cohort to define whether innate immune defects underpin the susceptibility to infectious exacerbation and progression of airways disease. It will perform microbiological characterisation of each group and will look at the behaviour of groups who have frequent infectious exacerbations of disease as compared to those that do not. Work package three will measure lung injury and work package four will define physiological characteristics including chest wall muscle function in the cohort. Our work will sit within work package two. Researchers will collect data from patients within the cohort and in patients whom they may recruit locally and add to the cohort. Researchers will also share samples with other work packages (academic and industry based collaborators) as required to enable correlation of our findings with other investigators in our work package or other work packages. This project, which sits within work-package two will measure the capacity of primary phagocytes (neutrophils, monocytes and macrophages) isolated from COPD patients' blood or alveolar macrophages isolated from patients' lungs to carry out key host defence functions and compare these to similar cells isolated from age and sex-matched non-smokers or smokers without COPD as controls.