Amir Zeki
University of California-Davis, CA·Pharmacology
Asthma narrows the airways and affects people at every age, yet the inhalers available today often fail to control symptoms or prevent sudden attacks, and the list of drug classes that open airways has barely changed in decades. This work pursues an unexpected candidate: statins, the cholesterol-lowering drugs taken by millions for heart disease.
- Fields
Pharmacology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
- Topics
asthma
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
statins
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Determine whether inhaled Pitavastatin, a statin reformulated for delivery as a nebulized aerosol, acts as a bronchodilator in living rhesus macaques with airway hyperresponsiveness, using a crossover design in an established nonhuman primate asthma model.
- Test whether Pitavastatin enhances the effect of standard asthma drugs by combining it with the bronchodilator Formoterol and the corticosteroid Dexamethasone in precision-cut lung slices from juvenile and adult rhesus macaques.
- Model the asthmatic airway ex vivo by pretreating naive macaque lung slices with Type 2 pro-inflammatory cytokines, then compare pre-treatment and post-treatment Pitavastatin protocols against controls.
- Measure cytokines and chemokines secreted into lung slice media to test whether Pitavastatin, with or without Dexamethasone, reduces airway inflammation.
More about the research
Beyond lowering lipids, statins block an enzyme called HMG-CoA reductase and, through that, dampen inflammation, limit cell proliferation, reduce oxidative damage, and reduce scarring. Over the past decade this lab has investigated statins as a therapy for airway disorders including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Why it matters
If an inhaled statin opens airways and calms inflammation where oral statins could not reach, it would add a genuinely new drug class for asthma and potentially other obstructive airway diseases such as COPD, offering an option for patients whose symptoms and exacerbations are not controlled by current inhalers. Results in nonhuman primates would determine whether the formulation is worth advancing to human trials.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
University of California-Davis: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 647 research doctorates a year.
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