Treating a Deadly Lung Disease with a Little Help from Amoebas

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes emphysema, chronic bronchitis and other conditions, is among the top causes of death in the U.S. No current therapies can prevent or reverse COPD. But thanks to amoebas, a new study has identified genes that may help protect lung cells against such harm—and potentially reverse COPD symptoms.

“I see COPD patients, so this was something very important to me,” says the study's lead author Corrine Kliment, a lung disease researcher and physician at the University of Pittsburgh. To search for potentially useful genes, Kliment and her team turned to the soil-dwelling amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum.

Amoebas have many genes that are also found in humans, but the microscopic creatures have much shorter life cycles—so scientists can use them to quickly spot genes of interest before studying mammalian models. “We often joke that humans are just amoebas with hair,” says study senior author Douglas Robinson, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

About 75 percent of COPD deaths are linked to smoking cigarettes. So Robinson's laboratory (in four short weeks) screened 35,000 amoebas, whose genes were modified to overproduce a range of different proteins, to see if any of those proteins might protect the amoebas from smoke damage. When researchers exposed all the amoebas to cigarette smoke extract, they found the ones that fared best were overproducing certain proteins important for cellular metabolism.

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