A Wayne State University School of Medicine Cancer Biology Program faculty member traveled to Australia this month as an invited speaker to share a novel therapy for asthma discovered in her lab.

The fifth International Pharmaceutical Federation's Pharmaceutical Sciences World Congress was held April 13-16 in Melbourne. Dr. Merkel, an assistant professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences in WSU's Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, was the only delegate from WSU.

"In this project, we have found a way to deliver short interfering RNA, or siRNA, into T cells as a novel asthma therapy. siRNAs have been known to suppress gene expression since the early 2000s," she said.

The Nobel Prize was awarded for this discovery in 2006. Dr. Merkel's research team uses siRNAs therapeutically.

"However, T cells are very hard to treat with nucleic acids. We are the first to report T cell targeting and treatment in the lung of asthmatic animals. This approach is very significant as T cells play a central role in the pathophysiology of asthma where they orchestrate many downstream inflammatory cascades," she said.

Her lecture, "Ex vivo and in vivo siRNA delivery to activated T cells as novel anti-inflammatory asthma therapy," was part of the Drug Delivery Australia session on pulmonary drug delivery.

A portion of the study was presented at the International Association for Pharmaceutical Technology World Congress on Pharmaceutics, Biopharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Technology, March 31-April 3, in Lisbon, Portugal, in a poster presentation first-authored by Dr. Merkel's doctoral student Yuran Xie.